On a recent Sunday I returned to the campus of Stanford University. Although I did not attend this famous western house of learning, I felt as if I grew up here. Indeed the campus is in my bloodlines.

My father graduated from Stanford in 1955, at time when the Farm was more affordable and you didn’t need an outrageous GPA to be accepted. This may have been considered a betrayal because my grandfather attended Cal (University of California at Berkeley), Stanford’s bitter rival. (The previous day Stanford defeated Cal in the “Big Game” 35-22).

My parents were married at the 1903 Memorial Church on August 3, 1968 and they settled just south of the campus in The Valley of Heart’s Delight among the apricot and cherry orchards in Sunnyvale. This area would be transformed, it’s orchards yielding to concrete, and the area would be rechristened “Silicon Valley”.

My father would bring my younger brother and I to Stanford football scrimmages and sometimes a baseball game. I loved the Stanford Bookstore, one of the best in the area, and sadly one of the few left. The campus is filled with beautiful buildings placed among the coast live oaks and palm trees. The center piece was the church before me.

I sketched the church from a circular planter in “The Quad”, just off center to the left. Waves of Sundayers wandered into view with their selfie-sticks and phones, framing their heads and the backlit north facade of the church. Most of the time I am so focused on the sketching that I tune out the hordes that fill in the foreground. They rarely make their way into my sketches, but it was hard to avoid the family that surrounded me.

“Oh look what artistic talent he has!” enthused the father, “You have real talent.” His wife stood in front of me and the sketch came to a halt. Such are the downsides of sketching in public, sometimes you get noticed and even more rarely,  you get interrupted.

“May I take you picture?” He asked. Now I was part of the scenery. The father, like my father, was a alumni, class of 1960. We small talked about the beauty of the church and the campus. Then he and his family departed with a, “Thanks for sharing your artistic abilities.”

This sketch of Hoover Tower was done in December of 2012 as a Christmas present for my father. It hung in a frame on his bedroom wall in Davis.

A Stanford touchstone for me is the 2001 Andy Goldsworthy sculpture Stone River. The serpentine wall was constructed using stones from the earthquake damage during the tectonic activities of 1906 and 1989. I have sketched Goldsworthy’s work many times. There are many of his sculptures in the Bay Area many within a short  distance of my San Francisco digs.

One of the  most daunting war memorials for me to sketch was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I had to experience that dark, reflective V, that seems a gapping scar in the green grass, a few times and from different angles before I could put pen to paper. The memorial is continuously crowded with visitors and veterans and I had to decide if I was going to include these people in my sketch. I finally decided to start sketching on an afternoon on one of my last days in a Washington. I selected a park bench that was across a tree dotted expanse of grass. The park bench faced the opposite direction so I had to sit on the edge and backwards. In the end I chose a simple expression to capture the memorial; without people and much color. In the end, like the memorial itself, I kept it to a simple expression, devoid of excess detail.

Martin’s View

When I arrived in DC, I headed out from my Georgetown digs and found my way towards the Lincoln Memorial. It seemed like this is a flame that attracted visitors from all over, who sat on the steps and looked out over the reflecting pool toward the exclamation mark of DC: the Washington Monument.

I started my first sketch of the trip. Where I sat and sketched was just off the right shoulder of where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963. On that day 200,000 people filled the National Mall on either side of the Reflecting Pool. Visiting this spot, this sacred ground, was truly a highlight of my visit. Ever since I had seen excepts of the grainy footage of the”I Have a Dream” speech on television, I have been enamored with King and his words.

I did a sketch of the Martin Luther King Jr Memoral (dedicated August 28, 2011). One of  his quotes that was carved into the marble wall came from California  in 1967.  It was a contrast to the war memorial on the other side of the mall, or maybe it really had the same meaning:

I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.

On this Veteran’s Day the wars of the world and particularly the Vietnam War has a face because of the veterans I have know who fought in that conflict. It forever changed them in ways I can never fathom. I thank them for their service and sacrifice.