100 Faces of Port Talbot: My Challenge

My name is David C., and I am a compulsive sketcher.

Since I discovered it as a concept, I've been urban sketching for about a year now. For much of that time my sketches had focused on what I think could be fairly described as ‘nice old buildings’, many of them in Port Talbot, South Wales, where I live. Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, as you'll hopefully think when I start posting my sketches. But something happened to me in March and April which made me think again about sketching.

In late March I was diagnosed with clinical depression. A few weeks later I made a long planned visit to Prague, and basically spent most of my waking hours in the city producing sketches. In some of the sketches, I moved from just trying to sketch single buildings, to trying to sketch whole scenes, including figures, and I could see how much more of a story they told than what I'd been producing up to this time. 

I don't want to suggest that the medicine I took didn't help. It did, and I'm sure it's far more responsible for my recovery than anything else. However I'm sure that sketching was also an important part of it. Since returning from Prague, I've been sketching more regularly than I ever did before.  I’ve also been trying to widen my repertoire, and show not only whole scenes from Port Talbot, but other sides of the town. Warts and all is a phrase I use a lot, and I think it’s a pretty good way of describing my attitude now. Basically, if it tells any kind of story about the town as it is now, then it’s a worthwhile subject.

A couple of days ago I was idly looking back through the sketchbooks I’ve filled, and on a whim I began counting how many sketches of Port Talbot I’ve made. It turned out that I’ve reached fifty. I felt unaccountably pleased with myself, and then I began to think. It’s pointless to think that you can tell the whole story of a town even just concentrating on the here and now in sketches. It’s a never ending task. Still, the fact is that I feel that I’ve only really just about started. There are so many more things, more aspects of the town that I want to sketch.

With this in mind, then, I have set myself a challenge. Over the next weeks and months, I want to make another 50 sketches of the town, with the aim of answering the question – What is Port Talbot? – in 100 sketches. I have this idea of making 99 by the middle of December, and then using my last sketch to show the Christmas decorations, or maybe Santa’s grotto in the shopping centre. Will it happen? Well, I’m halfway there already.

So, in the next fifty or so posts I'm going to show the sketches I've already made, and then post each one which follows. That's the challenge.