6/4/15 Platinum Carbon ink, watercolor, Caran d'Ache Museum colored pencils, Canson XL 140 lb. paper |
Whenever I return from international travel, I see my home
town with fresh eyes. This may be due to simple relief; as much as I love to
travel (and I dearly do), I love coming home even more. (After five hotel rooms
over the course of two weeks, is there nothing more comforting than sleeping in
your own bed and showering in your own normal bathroom?)
Yet it’s more than just relief. After being bombarded with
so many new and different sights and experiences in another country, I find
myself wondering how a foreigner visiting my home town would see these familiar
streets and buildings. In the same way that I was charmed by La Roque’s storybook architecture and impressed
by the Amphitheatre in Arles –
things that those towns’ citizens walk by each day without a thought – would a
visitor to Seattle be intrigued by construction cranes on every corner or dazzled
by the bright yellow sheathing of new buildings going up?
This sunny afternoon I walked out on the Northeast 70th
Street I-5 overpass and faced east. I could see the Calvary Christian Assembly
Church, the Roosevelt Light Rail Station’s
yellow construction crane, a new building with its yellow underwear exposed and (at
the far left of my sketch) a bit of another construction crane. Below me,
northbound rush-hour traffic on I-5 was noisy, stinky and somewhat nerve-wracking.
Home, sweet home.
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