Unexpected pyramid

Dear Sarah - Day 273 of our daily drawing exchange

Hi Sarah -

I don’t know that it’s possible to do an intensive week like this without suffering some brain explosion/implosion. As we leave the hotel, I look down at the undulating cobblestones and wonder, why don’t they level this out so people can walk without fear of ankle-twisting? and realize immediately that they can’t because the roads wobble because they are built atop another city!! This is also why the buildings are often shaped as they are (with curving walls) - because they are built over the top of ancient theatres and temples and marketplaces and those structures from bygone days were used as the foundations for whatever came later. Some of what came later was built hundreds of years ago, which underscores just how young places like Canmore are.

Today, when I first saw the pyramid, I thought it was some relatively recent architectural statement, only to learn it was built more than 2,000 years ago to house the remains of some dude with a big ego. From where I sat down to draw (one of our party was delayed by a few minutes due to the protests and strike, so I had an unexpected moment of quiet to observe and draw) the pyramid loomed over the equally impressive Porto San Paulo, one of the gates into Rome built perhaps three hundred years later (if I’m remembering correctly - we saw a LOT of history today and honestly, the various centuries of historical dates are beginning to blur together).

I could draw for DECADES and not get to the end of what strikes me as interesting. A few days seems ridiculously short.

So far, I think I have managed to stick to the plan and draw everything I have consumed. As I type this, I’m eating a lovely pastry filled with sour cherry filling. Yummy, but it has missed the cutoff for inclusion in today’s montage of mangiamo. I’ll draw again after I finish this up… I have no idea how I’m going to be using the drawings I’m accumulating. What a weird way to later revisit and remember a wonderful week in Rome!

For now - ciao!
Nikki

Buon pomeriggio or buon giornio (depending on when you see this).

Dudes with big egos seem to have been a problem since, well, forever. Your pastry sounds delish. I, too, had a delicious pastry today, a cinnamon-raisin swirl from Crust Bakery, which has a kiosk in the same shopping centre as Michael’s, where I went to buy a fan brush. Can’t wait to try it.

Before that, I walked along the Gorge and stopped to draw a sculpture I have passed many times. It’s called Camossung; according to the Saanich parks website, an ancient Songhees story tells of a young girl named Camossung, turned to stone by Hayls, the Transformer. Camossung is believed to have spirit powers. She protects the Songhees people’s local food resources of coho salmon, herring, oysters and ducks.

To be honest, before today, I thought it was Alice in Wonderland. Clearly not—but the style seems to lean European even though the subject is Indigenous. The sculpture was done around 2010 in consultation with Songhees people. I think it would be approached differently now.

I did a pencil sketch on the spot and then did an ink drawing using the art alphabet idea of finding the basic shapes.

When I got home, I ate the cinnamon swirl and then, for some reason, decided to take an inventory of all the photo frames I have collected over the years (and lugged around with me as I moved into ever-smaller places). In the process, I unearthed many things I had forgotten about (my first piece of fiction, written for a Classics 200 course) as well as my mother’s autograph book, which was a gift from her father in 1928, when she was 15. The last autograph was written in 1932 by my father, after they met at the University of Alberta. He wrote, May that friend who is to you most fine, most dear, prove to you most true. I believe he and her father (the two most important men in her life) were the only males to write in the book.

Ciao,

S