Melissa teases me that I’m an Urban Sketchers groupie. I have no particular desire to draw or paint, and no inclination to do the practice necessary to become even halfway decent at it. But I love watching people make art. Seeing a plaza or market or churchyard dotted with sketchers and painters always makes me smile.
At any Urban Sketchers event that Melissa attends—from a three-hour get-together in a random town to a three-day international conference—I love strolling among the sketchers and watching them work.
It always amazes me how multiple people can draw pictures of the same thing but make the results look so different. Each sketcher seems to have their own style, approach, and color sense. And each finds a different angle or detail that appeals to them. (For Melissa, the angle of a drawing often depends on where there’s shade to sit in.) At the “throw down” that happens after every Urban Sketchers outing—when the participants put all their sketches together on the ground for a photograph—the diversity is amazing to see.
I got plenty of chances to enjoy that in Poznan, Poland, the site of this year’s international conference. During that time, the old center of the city was overrun with sketchers: the 500 people (like Melissa) who got tickets to the conference before it sold out, several hundred more who couldn’t get tickets but came anyway to absorb the artsy atmosphere and attend the public sketch walks, and an army of local volunteers.
That meant that Poznan had more visitors than usual who spoke English, which made it easier for me to strike up conversations with fellow travelers (since I don’t speak German or Polish, the languages of most of Poznan’s usual tourists). Melissa and I agree that Urban Sketchers members seem unusually friendly and curious about the world. As at past events, everyone was very welcoming to the “nonsketching spouse” (as I call myself) who turned up from time to time.
The weather was wonderful for the conference: mostly sunny with highs in the 60s and 70sF. There was one cooler day with a brief rain storm and even some hail(!), but nothing dampened the spirits of the sketchers. Throughout the conference, the mood seemed upbeat. After all, the participants were spending their vacation doing something they love among like-minded people.
At the closing ceremony, the organizers announced that next year’s international conference will be held in Toulouse in southern France in July. Melissa has already visited Toulouse, and it will likely be very hot that time of year. So instead, we may plan trips next year around some of the regional Urban Sketchers events held in various Asian, European, and North American countries. Wherever we go, I’ll have the pleasure not only of discovering a new place but of seeing hundreds of paintings and drawings of that place posted by sketchers on Facebook and Instagram for weeks afterward.
