Dear Sarah - Day 138 of our daily drawing exchange
Return of the lion and mapping my way through Skaha
May 18, 2025
Hi Nikki,
I've been watching a lot of Danny Gregory videos on YouTube and feeling torn between realistic, intense, time-consuming drawing and the fast, loose, funny stuff he does. But I wanted to finish with the lion first, before trying my hand at speedy sketching.
I forgot to take photos of the finished stuffies. Kids liked them, but it's not the kind of project I want to do again!
XO S
Hi Sarah -
Oh, I like Danny Gregory a lot. Remind me to show you one of his books when you are at my place.
Strange day today - a LOT of hiking (and getting lost) from one end of Skaha Bluffs to the other, me in search of wifi to run a writing group meeting and Fabio and Barbara climbing, climbing… I wound up back at the car at the parking lot almost on time for the meeting and then had to drive off in search of wifi. Hiked about 10K over hill and dale, up an down, bush-whacking, picking my way over narrow trails… (route in shown in purple, route out in green) and because we wound up at the wrong cliff, didn’t wind up climbing. Which was fine. An overcast morning morphed into a glorious afternoon and I spent the final stretch of the early evening (after the writing group meeting) reading my psychogeography book.
I suppose I was inspired to draw the sketchy map of Skaha Bluffs as a result. This quote comes to mind:
“A map can never hope to capture accurately the lives of those individuals whose journeys it sets out to trace, for in the process individuality is inevitably flattened out and reduced to points on a chart.” Merlin Coverley (reflecting on the writings of Michel de Certeau)
This is true of today. The map looks pretty straightforward - follow the path in, follow the path out. But the reality was quite something else. Cliffs. Gullies. Paths that petered out in a deep forest. Paths that became invisible when ambling over rock slabs. Paths that snaked along the top of bluff edges. Paths that wound through thick underbrush, barely keeping one step ahead of the encroaching foliage. A mountain goat watching from on high. Eagles soaring. Ravens. Hikers. Climbers. Rain clouds threatening. Lake in the distance. Rock. Lichen. Dried grasses from last year. Bright bursts of green as this year’s growth comes in.
Me, touching everything in reach on my way, leaving my scent on logs, bushes, and boulders just in case I took a wrong turn or turned a weak ankle… toppled over a crumbling path edge and into a canyon below.
None of that is on the map. Hm.
Until tomorrow -
Nikki