“Geometry of Light” at SAAM

 

11/21/25 "This is Not a Refuge!" by Anila Quayyum Agha, Seattle Asian Art Museum

When I first saw images of a new exhibit at Seattle Asian Art Museum, I knew it would be fun and challenging to approach the work using white on black. Anila Quayyum Agha’s Geometry of Light is a dazzling installation of laser-cut, resin-coated aluminum. “Suspended from the ceiling, Agha’s steel cubes are laser-cut with intricate designs that project geometric shadows onto the visitor. She draws on both the light and dark of her own life, using South Asian art practices to convey the gender discrimination she faced growing up as a young girl in Pakistan.”

One of several laser-cut paper pieces

In addition to two installations, the exhibit includes several wall-mounted paper art pieces with a similar intricacy and delicacy. Including embroidery thread and beads, the pieces are inspired by traditional Islamic art. The patterns are sometimes called “’feminine’ or ‘decorative,’” the placard said, “but she challenges the idea that this kind of art is less important. Instead, she turns it into something powerful and meaningful, filled with emotion and history.”

Those pieces and her artistic intentions moved me as a former fiber artist. At the time, fellow fiber artists and I often discussed the patronizing attitude our culture has toward the use of fiber, beads and other materials traditionally associated with “women’s crafts.”

I chose the piece called “This is Not a Refuge!” to sketch. To enhance the illumination effects, the exhibit rooms are darkened, so it wasn’t easy to see, yet it was actually easier than drawing dark on white paper (which I’ve also tried to do in other dark exhibits). A white colored pencil on black paper was an ideal way to capture the light.

A second installation piece of laser-cut aluminum

Thinking Aloud About a Perpetual Sketch Journal

 

8/12/25 Caffe Ladro, Roosevelt neighborhood

Ever since I parenthetically mumbled the idea in my post about my five-year diary, the question keeps popping up in my head: How could a sketchbook be designed to serve the same longitudinal function as a written perpetual diary? (Please allow me to think aloud here for a bit.)

Of course, any large sketchbook could serve this function well: Just date each page or spread, and make a sketch on that page each year on that date. (I believe that’s how nature perpetual journals work.) The challenging part for me is that if the habit is to be sustainable, the book must be portable. If it’s something I use only when I’m home, the habit will last only for a short while, and then I’ll stop. I’ve already failed at that kind of sketch journal often enough to accept this.

9/10/25 Herkimer Coffee, Greenwood neighborhood

With this acceptance as a starting point, I looked at my current daily-carry Uglybooks, which I’ve been using successfully and consistently as a chronological sketch journal for two years. What if I started using my daily-carry Uglybook as a perpetual sketch diary?

Let’s say I decided to make a spread for each date. I’m not sure I could fit five years’ worth of sketches on a spread, but surely I could fit three years. Shown here are a few sketch journal spreads that contain at least three sketches. The freeform format I already use would accommodate sketches of various sizes.

When I fill one book (23 days per book), I’d move on to the next book. About 16 books would cover the entire year. When the last spread of the last book is filled on Dec. 31 (or whatever the last day of my perpetual year is), I’d go back to the first book and make the second sketch on the Jan. 1 spread (each sketch would be labeled with the year and, as is my current habit, the time and weather, if I’m sketching outdoors).

9/30/25 Turtle Coffee, Greenwood neighborhood

That seems very practical and doable, doesn’t it? What appeals to me most is that it is not too far off from what I’ve been doing the past couple years, so it won’t feel like a whole new thing. The only snag I haven’t figured out is that on some days, I currently use my daily-carry Uglybook as a catch-all for other random sketches – like overflow parking as needed. I don’t want to discourage myself from making such sketches just because they don’t fit the format, but I also don’t want to carry a second book. 

Maybe I could assign several pages toward the end of each book for such overflow – which would be messily out of sequence. Or avoid predating the spreads, so I could sometimes stretch out beyond the typical single spread? That could be a slippery slope toward exactly what I’m already doing.

Hmmm. . . the idea still needs work, but it has a lot going for it. Comments or suggestions? Have you ever kept or seen anything like a perpetual sketch diary, especially in a portable size?

11/16/25 Due Cucina, Roosevelt neighborhood

No Difference

3/5/25 Neighbors Barbershop, Wedgwood

8/25/25 Green Lake

Whenever I make sketches that were made while waiting but have no other stories to tell about them, I file the scans in a folder labeled “sketchwaiting.” They are waiting for me to think of something new to say about sketchwaiting so that I can blog about them. I looked in the folder the other day and realized I had a sketch in there from March! I obviously hadn’t thought of anything new to say.

10/16/25 Whole Foods, Roosevelt neighborhood

10/19/25 Volunteer Park

Then it occurred to me that for a lifestyle sketcher like me, there’s not much difference between sketchwaiting and any other type of sketching. Sketches happen spontaneously, whether I’m walking, shopping, or waiting for a friend. No wonder I have nothing new to say.

11/11/25 Green Lake

Sketchwaiting is the embodiment of what Nishant Jain provocatively asks: What if every time we felt like pulling out our phone, we pulled out a sketchbook instead? What if, indeed.

11/15/25 Rosellini's Bakery, Ballard neighborhood

A Wondrous Earth at St. Mark’s

 

11/18/25 Terra installation at St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle

A wondrous temporary installation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral challenged USk Seattle in just about every way. Terra, a 24-foot replica of planet Earth suspended in the center of the cathedral nave, slowly revolves on its tilted axis. The jaw-dropping scale of the globe in the context of the cathedral is difficult enough to convey, but there’s also its three-dimensionality: How to keep the sphere from looking like a flat disc?

I’m not sure I was successful at capturing any of that, but at least I can thank Kay for being seated in a pew and lending some sense of scale!

The globe at St. Mark’s is one of hundreds that Orbis Globes has installed in various locations since 1985. During the throwdown, an Orbis installer chatted with us about the challenges of suspending an inflated, revolving 24-foot Earth. I’m sure that’s challenging – but not as challenging as drawing it!

Pencilvember: Derwent Lightfast

 

Reference photo by Frank Koyama

As much as I enjoyed using Derwent Lightfast, I decided to cut the week short because I have at least two more pencil brands I want to use during Pencilvember. I’m having fun using the same brand for several days running, then switching to another brand. The uninterrupted succession teaches me nuances of each brand while they are fresh in my memory.

When I have a self-imposed time limit of 20 minutes, one thing I really appreciate about using super-soft pencils like Lightfast is that I can use the side of the pencil tip to cover a lot of area quickly. The pencils are almost like charcoal (without the dreaded mess, of course). You can especially see this in Charli and Kuzya (below). In each case, I spent half the time on the eyes to nail the expression. That done, I could get the rest down efficiently by scribbling with the core’s broad side.

Insight: I’m starting to see that my degree of accuracy (or lack thereof) isn’t determined much by the length of time I take. I can get proportions right or wrong, regardless, which means most of my time is used in applying many layers of color. This is an unexpected outcome of my Pencilvember practice, but it’s not a bad thing to discover. It means that once I establish the proportions (right or wrong), I can give a drawing as much or as little time as I want, and the outcome will just be more finished looking, the longer I work on it. I don’t have to decide at the beginning whether a piece will be more “finished” or not.

The part I’m not happy about is this: Despite the short time I’m taking with these, they still look nearly as tight as the drawings I used to take hours to make. For the rest of Pencilvember, I’m going to challenge myself to loosen up in terms of expression as well as color application. This is always a tough one for me, but I want to push in the direction of caricature. I tried it a few years ago when I was heavily into human portraiture, and it felt way more challenging than it should have been. Maybe animals will be easier.

My Longitudinal Study Continues

The past and the future, five years at a time. (This is a terrible image. . . the new book's cover is forest green, not black.)

How often do we get to easily see what we were doing or feeling or thinking exactly one year ago on this date – or two years ago or five?

I blogged most recently in February this year about my five-year diary, a Leuchtturm 1917 Some Lines a Day. I’ve also written about it several times at the Well-Appointed Desk (my initial product review in 2020, a progress report in 2022, and a final follow-up in February).

Although it’s one of few things I talk about here that aren’t related to sketching, it’s similar to my daily sketch journal in that it tracks the ordinary day-to-dayness of my life. As I write each evening in my Some Lines book, I read the previous entries for that date on the same page, and I’m often moved or surprised by whatever I was doing in prior years. Any kind of diary (or sketchbook) will do this, of course, but a five-year diary puts all the years on one page so conveniently. It’s a compact longitudinal study of my life.

[An aside: Called a perpetual journal, nature journalists use a similar format to track year-to-year seasonal changes in plants and weather. I have often thought about how a perpetual urban sketch journal could be made. The main problem is physical: It would have to be a large, not-very-portable book to fit several sketches on a single page – in a heavy volume of 366 pages. A more compact idea would be to make a concertina booklet for each date, and the entire booklet unfolded would show five (or however many) years of sketches. But that would mean making 366 booklets (or half that if I used both sides)! And then how would they all be stored? Although the platform is dubious, I must say that Facebook very elegantly performs this perpetual sketch journal function for me in a digital format: Every time I look at my “Memories,” I can see every sketch I’ve ever posted on that date going back through my history on Facebook (which coincides fairly closely with how long I’ve been sketching). Well, maybe someday I’ll think of a workable format.]

I’m writing about my five-year diary again now because I finally completed the one I began on Nov. 16, 2020. That might seem like an odd date to start a dated diary that begins, like all diaries, on Jan. 1. I chose that date, however, because it’s my birthday, and I liked the idea of beginning a diary on my life’s anniversary rather than a date based on an arbitrary and meaningless Gregorian calendar.

The past five years have been, by far, the hardest and most painful of my entire life. Although it is often difficult to be reminded of what I was going through in years past, it is also gratifying to realize that I had pushed past that day’s hardship, survived, and even grown from it. I often feel compassionate toward my former self, wishing I could go back in time to reassure myself that things will get better eventually. Reading those entries never fails to fill me with gratitude.

I just cracked open a fresh volume on Nov. 16. Using the Some Lines a Day format has taught me how and what to write in it. Rather than record only what happened, I want to note how I felt about it. For example, the fact that a huge storm occurred is not nearly as moving as recalling that I felt scared because it was the first time I would worry about losing power while living alone in the house. The more specific the memory, the more interesting it is to read.

I skipped entire months in 2021, but I don't beatmyself up about it.
Sometimes absence of words speaks volumes.

I also find that some of the most rewarding entries to read are those that mentioned people I interacted with that day. This was especially challenging during the pandemic heyday when I hardly saw anyone, but it was gratifying to later remember the kindness of a grocery worker who loaded my food in the pickup lot or friendly words exchanged with an Amazon driver. It also makes me realize a whole year (or two or three) has gone by since I last had lunch with a particular friend – and seeing them again is long overdue.

I know historians like to read people’s diaries (God forbid mine should fall into the hands of a historian!) to learn about events of the times, but I avoid writing about current events unless I have thoughts or feelings that might interest me in the future. Mere facts can be Googled; my feelings about them cannot.

Gratitude, wonder, joy – those are the things I want to read about in the future. And although grief, pain and sadness are not easy to reread, I also appreciate that everything I felt in the past makes me who I am now. Reading those entries gives me perspective and insight.

Retrospection is a gift to myself, and my five-year diary is that daily gift. 

Drink & Draw at Halcyon

 

11/14/25 Halcyon Brewery, Greenwood neighborhood

To follow Nishant Jain’s book promotion event on Friday night, USk Seattle held a drink & draw so that event attendees and others could meet him. Just a few blocks up the street from Couth Buzzard Books in the Greenwood neighborhood, Halcyon Brewery is rare among brew pubs for having a large, central table that can seat more than a dozen. We had such a great turnout that night that we had to pull in a couple more smaller tables to fit us all. One benefit of the long table was that it encouraged us to sketch each other! It was a fun evening of casual sketching and chatting.