cactus – Jana Bouc, Artist

Walking with my dust mop, ink & colored pencil

I needed a new dust mop, a tube of silicon adhesive and some exercise, so I put them together and walked to Pastime Hardware, a large family-owned hardware store that has everything, including their famously helpful employees.

The sketch above actually closely resembles me when I’m out walking, with my green backpack that is so comfy, even when loaded with junk, my nifty purple cap, and old green shorts.

On the way to the store I called my mom on my iPhone, getting that task done as well. As she told me tales of her adventures with her new, and first computer, I stopped to draw some cacti I spotted along the way.

My last stop was at the video store to pick up a copy of Local Color which never came out in theaters in Northern California and is finally available on DVD. Then I walked home with the mop over my shoulder feeling like I should be whistling a little tune.

Walking and Sketching in the Neighborhood

I see something that inspires me to draw every time I take a walk. On this sunny winter walk, neighbors were out tending to their gardens, and flowers were blooming in unexpected places, like surrounding the fireplug above on a busy street corner.

There’s a house a few blocks from mine where the front lawn was replaced long ago by a hundred different kinds of cacti and succulents. I wondered how they managed to keep the various spikey things trimmed and on this day I found out: carefully, with very thick gloves and shovels.

They’d trimmed their enormous Nopales (or Prickly Pear) cactus and piled up the “paddles” in this old wheelbarrow. As the husband and wife worked they acted like it was completely normal for me to be standing in front of their house for 15 minutes sketching their wheelbarrow. I’m not sure what they ended up doing with the pieces of cactus. As I finished sketching, the husband piled a few paddles on his shovel and walked off down the street with them.

Later I passed this cheery scene in someone’s driveway. I didn’t see anyone around, but the brightly colored chairs and containers of (?) on a tray looked awfully inviting.