The local artist discusses his work as an urban sketcher
By LAILA AZHAR — features@theaggie.org
Pete Scully has been drawing for as long as he can remember. The Davis-based artist — who also serves as the management services officer of the UC Davis department of statistics — holds his pen with a slightly odd, childlike grasp.
“I think it’s because I was holding [a pen] before they taught me how to not hold it like that,” Scully said. “Which I never learned.”
Originally from London, Scully can recall early memories of bringing his sketchbook to Primrose Hill, with the British cold freezing his fingers as he drew. But it was when he moved from London to Davis in 2005 that his passion for sketching took off.
“It gave me a way to look at the new place where I lived,” Scully said.
Scully specializes in urban sketching: the practice of drawing one’s surroundings. His pieces include sketches of Davis’ Arboretum, Armadillo Music and the Bike Barn, to name a few.
This form of sketching requires careful focus and attention to detail — a potentially dying art in an age of ubiquitous distractions. As social media erodes people’s attention spans, it can be rare to find someone grounded enough to take the time to soak in their surroundings enough to capture them on paper.
“The way I look at keeping a sketchbook is that it is what keeps me able to focus on everything else,” Scully said. “I kind of think that, maybe, that’s my way of ascertaining a little bit of control over my world.”
His art feels true to the spirit of Davis, the details so accurate and vivid they often invoke a sense of nostalgia — perhaps due to the human elements of his drawings. Rather than depicting polished, sterile versions of a location, Scully prefers to draw scenes exactly as they are.
“I don’t make things up when I draw; I try to draw what I see,” Scully said. “I don’t leave out garbage cans — in fact, I prefer to have the garbage cans.”
This is quite literal; while drawing the construction of Walker Hall, Scully had to stand on a bench in order to look over the fence. Faced with two garbage cans in the way, he ultimately decided to leave them in the sketch.
“You know what, that’s part of the story,” Scully said.
Along with being an urban sketcher himself, Scully has worked to share this practice with the Davis community. In 2008, he served as one of the original correspondents for the Davis chapter of Urban Sketchers: “a global community of sketchers dedicated to the practice of on-location drawing,” according to their website. In 2010, after attending the Urban Sketching Symposium in Portland, he was inspired to create “Let’s Draw Davis,” a monthly sketch crawl that is still active today, in which participants sketch different locations in Davis.
For him, inclusivity is a key part of the group.
“This is something that anyone can do,” Scully said. “It’s something you can be part of if you fancy drawing.”
He has also organized events in London, including a Jack the Ripper-themed sketch crawl in Whitechapel.
“Not glorifying Jack the Ripper,” Scully said, but rather focusing on the history of the area, and the ways in which things have changed and stayed the same.
When moving between cities — which he often does, as he enjoys “seek[ing] out different flavors of city” — he finds himself approaching his art differently. In Davis, he’s familiar with the local scenery. In a skyscraper-filled city such as New York, he has to adjust his perspective.
Wherever he is in the world, however, Scully said that it’s often the shadows that catch his eye. He finds himself drawn to interesting shapes or patterns of light.
“As long as I’ve got somewhere to stand,” Scully said, referencing that as the most important factor in choosing where to draw.
In line with this, he’s spent a lot of time drawing the trees of Davis.
“If you ignore the trees, you might miss all the interesting shapes they have,” Scully said. “These trees are beautiful, if you really look at the bark and the textures and the shapes.”
He recalled that Davis lost several trees in a storm a few years back.
“I realized that some of them I’ve drawn before, and now I’ve got them on paper,” Scully said.
One memory in particular stands out; after drawing a double-page spread of a tree, he returned the next day only to find the tree gone.
“I’ve found myself, especially lately, drawing loads of trees, just because I’m worried — what if they fall down?” Scully said.
By capturing specific moments in time, his work has created a record of the many changes that have taken place in Davis.
“I like to record the changes in cities, not just the static things,” Scully said.
It is precisely this appreciation for change that has sparked a love for drawing construction sites. Scully is quite well known for this — so much so that people on campus often give him advance notice on where they’ll be.
Through drawing these construction sites, he’s able to record cities in their often-forgotten transitory phases.
“I love the in-between bit, because it will never look like that again,” Scully said. “That’s a big motivator for me to get out and draw.”
It is precisely this change that he wants viewers to keep in mind as they view his work, hoping people recall their own stories associated with the places he draws.
When displayed in the Pence Gallery downtown, a viewer looking at Scully’s sketch of The Mustard Seed, a restaurant in Downtown Davis didn’t see The Mustard Seed at all. Instead, as he told Scully, the picture evoked memories of the friends who lived in the house in the 1960s, before it was turned into a restaurant.
“I don’t see that. I drew it, but I don’t see that,” Scully said, noting that his perspective on a location is limited to his own memories. “Think of how [the pictures] relate to your own story and your own experiences in Davis.”
Scully’s work, from his drawings to his initiatives focused on getting others to draw, encourage a greater connection to one’s local community. His work highlights the details of Davis, making it impossible not to notice the speckled leaves of an arboretum tree or the vibrant display in a shop window.
As he succinctly put it:“This is where you live.”
Written by: Laila Azhar — features@theaggie.org
