The task: “Start a collection based on the first found object you see on your walk, whatever that is. You decide what the connection between the objects is (can be based on shape, color, size etc.).”
I lucked out on this one. I had braced myself for the likelihood of something like this happening:
Of course I did.
Instead, when I walked out of my apartment door, I was greeted by a giant hawk perched atop a handicap sign in my parking lot. This bird has been a fixture in my neighborhood over the last couple of months, easily found sitting in a tree, sitting on top of the dumpster, sitting on the railing of a patio…Always sitting, always watching. I don’t know if it’s been displaced by construction, if my apartment complex is infested with rodents, or if one of my neighbors is a falconer, but it’s always strange to me to see animals I associate with “the wild” inhabiting the suburbs.
“Take wing, Lazarus! For today we hunt deals, and we shall find them at the Oldest of Navies!”
Whatever the cause, I was happy, as I’d much rather draw this magnificent bird than my other options: a discarded Big Gulp or a sock mysteriously tied to a tree branch. I decided to make my connective theme “animals.”
Despite living in the eye of a hurricane of strip malls there is an abundance of wildlife to be found around my residence. I seem to be located at ground zero of the squirrel uprising, but I frequently see geese, deer, raccoons, crows…Two summers ago there was a snapping turtle that regularly appeared outside of my door. I would put it in a box, drive it down the street to a pond and release it, only for it to show back up again a week later. I repeated this process so many times that, to this day, my 3rd floor neighbor greets me with “Hey, Turtleman!”
“Fancy meeting you here…for the 37th time.”
On this particular outing I encountered the usual menagerie, but also a couple of foxes and, oddly, a bunch of seagulls. An unexpected sight considering my closest connection to the sea is a Joe’s Crab Shack.
I brought my dogs along on my walk, in an effort to kill two birds with one stone. Instead, I tried to kill many birds (and squirrels, and rabbits, and especially foxes) with two dogs. Some days they wouldn’t blink at a grizzly bear, other days they react to a chipmunk like it’s an abominable snowman. On this trip they were feeling the latter, so, my doodles were fleeting as my subjects were played off the stage by a chorus of barking.
Friends of man, enemies of art.
Ignoring the fact that is was a logistical nightmare to combine a dog walk with a sketch crawl, and that I’m self-conscious about the results, it was fun to see an environment that had grown mundane over time with fresh eyes, and to take the time to appreciate the natural world thriving in what often feels like urban blight.
