Spud, Lady Liberty and Nostalgia

 

3/29/24 Spud Fish & Chips, Alki Beach, West Seattle

When I was a teenager, I occasionally hung out with friends on Alki Beach in West Seattle. That era may have been the last time I ate at the Alki location of Spud Fish & Chips, a small local chain that has been around since 1935. Among the several Spud locations in the Puget Sound area, the one I’m most familiar with is at Green Lake, which was one of my earliest urban sketches. (Ironically, even though it’s close enough to walk to, I rarely eat there.) It was a fun nostalgia trip to have lunch there last week with a cousin I hadn’t seen in a long time. Funny – the fish and chips weren’t nearly as good as I always thought they were when I was a teen.

Mini Statue of Liberty

Across the street from Spud is the beach “entrance,” if you will – a short flight of stairs helps you down to the sand, and some benches surround a miniature version of Lady Liberty. That, too, was nostalgic: USk Seattle sketched there nearly 10 years ago, and even now, those are among my favorite sketches, especially from back then when I’d only been sketching for a couple of years.

Finally, one more fond memory of Alki Beach was on a cold day when Don Colley came to town to teach a workshop. Warming up at Top Pot Doughnuts with Michele, I was lucky enough to get one-on-one feedback from Don, who had ducked in to get out of the cold, too.

As for that Top Pot, USk Seattle had met there a couple of times, too. Most memorably, I used that outing to practice some lessons I had learned from Andika Murandi’s workshop the previous week. Sadly, the Alki Top Pot didn’t survive the pandemic.