A Year in Sidewalks

Sidewalk adjacent to Mozart Park, JP; 11"x7"; pen

Bremen Park, Eastie; 11"x14"; pencil

For this assignment, I decided to give myself one additional guideline: I wanted to do sidewalk drawing for every neighborhood I have lived or worked in (Allston, Dorchester, Eastie, JP, Back Bay, and Downtown). For one, this would give me an excuse to go back to some of my favorite places; for another, I had a good idea of where would be best to sit and draw sidewalk cracks in all of those places. I tried to choose cracks that looked like they would be interesting on paper, cracks that were eye-catching in some way—ideally, ones that were made up of a lot of intersections and made some interesting shapes. I didn’t always find ones quite so interesting, though, and I often had to settle for whatever I wandered across (especially in Boston Public Garden, where I wandered for 20 minutes before finding a  tiny, insignificant crack—and then, of course, right after I was done drawing it and started making my way out of the Garden, I found a whole stretch of sidewalk full of them. Oh well.) 

Boston Common; pencil & eraser; 5.5"x8.5"

Boston Public Garden; 3"x3"

I think my process was different, based on where I was. Usually, I would search for some kind of public space I could look for cracks in the sidewalk, locate an interesting one, and find some bench or patch of grass I could sit and draw it from. If there wasn’t a good spot to draw it from, I would take a picture and then sketch it out later from home. If there was, I’d decide what medium I thought would best represent the crack. I usually started off with a light pencil and then I would go over it either in pen or in darker shades of pencil. I think there was still a pretty wide variety in the in-person drawings, though—I think the Eastie drawing is one of my favorites because of its simplicity, while the Boston Common one could have probably used a lot more thought in its composition, and I think I probably was also overthinking the shading of the asphalt and the weight of the lines. Interestingly, both the drawings I did of Downtown felt a little clumsier. I think part of the issue is that Downtown has always felt very sterile and corporate to me, especially compared to other neighborhoods. Last year, it was always a transit point for me—a means to get from one neighborhood to another, not a final destination. Even though I know this year will be different, I still haven’t really grown to appreciate Downtown yet, and I think it shows. 

Fields Corner Station, Dorchester; 11"x14";colored pencil, pencil & eraser

The mediums I used were varied, and the methods I used also somewhat varied—the first few drawings were pretty conventional pencil drawings, which were pretty straightforward—I tried to use a mix of pencil weights, and had mixed results. I think pen might be my favorite medium out of all of them. I found myself making much more well-thought-out decisions about what weight to use and whether to color in a certain part or not, because I knew those decisions were not reversible in the way that it would have been with pencil. The last medium I used was a little experimental. Because the tile was dark and the crack was white in the Field’s Corner drawing, I wanted some way to represent that inversion of the norm. I used a white color pencil to sketch out the lines, then went over it with a 5B pencil. When I realized the white colored pencil wasn’t showing up the way I thought it would under the pencil, I erased the pencil and discovered that through erasing but leaving some pencil residue, the white showed up a lot more easily—so for the rest of the drawing, I just shaded and erased the areas where the white colored pencil was. It was a pretty long, painfully dull process—although I was pretty happy with the end result.

Sidewalk in front of the Sil, Allston; pen; 5.5"x8.5"

Sometimes before drawing, sometimes after, if I was in a neighborhood I hadn’t been in for a while, I’d go check in on some of my favorite places. In Eastie, this was a bakery my City Year team used to go to all the time on our way to school or to the T, a place called Lolly’s—which had apparently been renovated and looked shiny, new, and beautiful, and it was still hopping with people from the neighborhood. In Dorchester, it was the walk to the liquor store I used to make with an old roommate. In Allston, it was the South Asian store I went to get supplies from on my first day living in Boston when I decided I needed to make some dal bhat to feel at home (although this time, I picked up some frozen methi parathas). It was like I had made myself a tour of my time in Boston, of all my old haunts. A year really isn’t that long, but I guess I collected a lot of pieces of the city in my mind in that short amount of time. 

Boston Public Library Courtyard; 26"x20"; pen