Tag Archives: Washington

Ghost lodging

The Panama Hotel was the centerpiece of Seattle’s once-thriving Japanese community, until every one of the neighborhood’s residents was rounded up and imprisoned during World War II. Many stowed their personal belongings in the basement of the Panama for safekeeping—and never came back to claim them. The few who did return after the war found their homes and businesses had been sold out from under them. Japantown was finished.

To this day, the hotel is still stuffed with personal effects and artifacts from the war era. The Panama is now part hotel, part museum, part tea house. I sketched in the warm light of the front windows this week, trying to capture a sense of what Japantown must have felt like so many decades ago. But all I found was an overwhelming feeling of what has been lost to Seattle—and what will never return.

This American Sketchbook

Last year the folks at Tacoma’s Broadway Center for the Performing Arts asked me to do a set of illustrations of their historic theaters. Then they kindly offered me a media sponsorship of one of their upcoming shows. I was happy to say yes (hey, free tickets for me and my friends!), but I didn’t give it much thought beyond that—the illustrations were plenty of fun on their own. But then they said, “We think we have the perfect show lined up for you.”

And that’s how I got to chat with Ira Glass yesterday. While I waited my turn at the meet-and-greet, I did what I always do: reach for pen and paper. The best part was the sketch turning into a collaboration—when Ira added the word bubble.

Stay away, Paul

You know, as much I love Paul Bunyan and his mighty axe, I’m breathing a sigh of relief that he and his ilk haven’t gotten to every bit of forest on the continent. Because far better than any lumberjack (even a mythical one) is a patch of virgin, old growth forest. Thankfully, the only folks you’ll see among these towering douglas firs and red cedars are fellow tourists—carrying camera tripods instead of axes.

Pink palace

If you’ve seen the film advertised on the marquee, you’ll know that there probably isn’t a better place to see it than at a bright pink vintage theater.

Putting the “win” in “window”

Window dressing, I am sorry to say, is a dying art. There are still so many old storefront buildings in the U.S. with massive display windows. And so, so few of them still use those windows to display anything, let alone create an imaginative world in still life.

Whenever I find an exception, a holdout from the good old days of theatrical store displays, I’m ready to jump for joy. So you can imagine my excitement at the fact that just a few short blocks from my house sits NW Costume—a living treasure. The owner swaps out the displays every few months, and the results parade through like a revolving door of mannequin-theatre masterpieces.

Bright and early

I’m generally a morning person—especially when it comes to sketching. But I live at 47 degrees north latitude, where for months at a time, being a morning person means spending a lot of time in the dark. Right now I’m still shaking off that lazy Northwest winter-mode version of “early,” where 8 am still feels like the crack of dawn. Now that we’re racing toward the summer solstice, “early” means something much different. If I want to make more sketches like this one (where, I might add, I had to drive for an hour just to reach that location!)—well, I’m clearly going to have to whip myself back into shape.

Calligraphic cobblestones

Roche Harbor is a hidden little pocket on San Juan Island, with impeccably preserved turn-of-the-century buildings, picturesque lime kiln ruins, a pristine saltwater inlet, and wharf buildings that hearken back to some (perhaps slightly revisionist) halcyon era gone by. Yet I had to force myself to even look at those things, let alone sketch them—because I would have been perfectly content to spend all day staring down at my feet.

Fishlass

You know, Salmon Beach is already a kind of mythical place, the kind of hidden world you read about in nautical legends. So it was completely fitting to follow the boardwalk path around a curve and suddenly find a siren* waiting on the rocks below.

*sculpture by Marilyn Mahoney

Above the clouds

One of my favorite things about living in the Northwest is how everything seems here seems to exist in its own microcosm. How you can be socked in a gray pall, nothing but pearly fog in every direction—unless you find a tall enough hill to climb. As you near the top, the light changes, sun filtering through in rays, until you reach the top—and find a whole different world waiting.

Living library

I love sketching wildflowers and other plants—but unfortunately, I’m really not great at identifying them. Of course, sketching is an excellent way to cement the information into your brain, but it doesn’t help much when you’re not sure what you’re looking at. I’m not a fan of standing there, juggling sketchbook and guidebook, trying to find one particular yellow flower amongst a huge grid of yellow flower photos (that all look, well, frankly identical to each other, and not at all like what’s in front of me), just to label my drawing correctly.

Enter the National Park Service. Wondering what kind of unusual flower that is? Forgot the name of that cactus? Just look around—nine times out of ten there’ll be a little engraved label nearby. Not near a marked trail? Just look in the little pamphlet the ranger handed you when you arrived! I swear, park rangers are the librarians of the natural world (and since I’m always telling people that librarians and park rangers are the most helpful folks on earth, this seems to fit).

I rely on this so much that when I’m not in a national park (or arboretum, or conservatory), I get frustrated. I mean, how great would it be if every front-yard garden, every school hedgerow, every city park came equipped with tiny interpretive signs?

Because after all, you never know when a sketcher is going to happen by.