This is where I started. Talking about how moving gets me drawing. I didn't mean drawing motion, but just the act of travel, setting out. Drawing while moving though is something I've tried to write about before - the way it forms a hinge between the focused or sustained and the cursory glance needing memory for details. Some things pass quickly: gates, cows, electrical poles; while others appear unchanged: sky and land intersection, the double yellow line.
Preparing for my working trip to Yosemite, reading the text so far, I am particularly taken by the language of Charles Palmer, a historian, who recounts the evolution of the high meadow roads. Most fascinating was the consciousness in the early 1920's of Steven Mather to open Yosemite to autotourism. Not only did he intend to make the spectacular place accessible to more people, he initiated a class shift: more people of less means could get there. The roads are designed as visual programs, vistas from the car - windshield tourism. Iconic views were purposely framed as these great smoothings carve through mountains, cut broad transects through disparate terrain. They in essence provide an extended view in motion.
I've never been to the upper meadows part of Yosemite so reading this, considering roads as a design project in and of themselves is (perhaps naively so) eye opening. So I am ready to hit it, the road, once again.
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