Why I Keep Going Back to College

July 04, 2019

Why I Keep Going Back to College

It has been exactly 3 years since I graduated from Downing College, Cambridge. I started sketching in college in 2015, during my second year final exams. With limited time to travel and sketch, I turned to sketch whatever was around me. Luckily, I lived in an extremely pretty college.

College in summer 2016, the year I graduated.

My first ever sketch of Downing, in April 2015

I had a quick look through all my sketchbooks, and I have sketched Downing College 19 times in various shapes and forms. Some are decent, some are terrible, all are nostalgic. The reason college is so important for me is this - a lot of the urban sketchers I follow have amazing styles. They are instantly recognisable through their work. This is the holy grail for a lot of artists - to see a piece of art and immediately know who did it. I spent a lot of my initial time trying to establish a “style”. This used to stress me out, especially when I produced work that I didn’t think “fit” my so-called “style”.

One of my earlier sketches, June 2015

The truth is, I didn’t have a style and I still don’t. It honestly takes decades to develop one that is authentic and that one can be happy with. Sketching Downing College again and again made me slowly realise this. Every single sketch of Downing looks different. I have gone back to the same building so many times over so many years that, looking back, every subsequent time pushed me to grow my understanding of the structure of the building, the weight of the pillars, the distribution of the shapes.

Sketching Downing helped me get out of my own head and my fruitless hurry of finding a “style”. Every time it was a challenge - how do I make Downing look better than the time before? The key word being “better”, not “the same”. Sketching the same thing again and again forces you to develop a style rather than replicate it mindlessly. That was my ah-ha moment at college.