Last summer we took a three week vacation to Europe. 

We went to London, Paris, Rome and a lot of places in between. 

It had been nearly a quarter of a century since I’d last been there. So long ago that my camera still used film (and I’d only taken five rolls with me at that.)

Not only did I take a lot more photos on this latest trip, but I also brought along a more artistic accessory: a sketchbook. And very much like a photographer stopping to capture the scenes of the people and architecture, history and beauty around me, I routinely stopped to sit and sketch a scene with ink onto the little folio notebook I’d brought along for that purpose.

It was simultaneously the most authentic and most frightening work I’d ever done.

Picture it.

I’m sitting on the ground against a wall of a building in Picadilly Circus, pen in hand, trying to stay out of the way of the hundreds of people rushing to and fro in all directions, madly casting my eye from page to scene and back and forth and back again, all the while my pen is rushing across the page, scribbling as fast as I could move it.  Everyone looked. People pointed. People stopped to take a photo of me, silly middle-aged Canadian propped up on the stone sidewalk inking out the scene.

It repeated itself in Paris.  There I was on the lawn of the Eiffel Tower, thousands of tourists wandering across the parched July grass, eating and drinking and looking down at the silly Canadian sitting there with his notebook and his pen working the intricate and detailed shapes of the very familiar outline of the tower there a couple hundred feet away in the afternoon sun.

And again in Rome. I pulled my notebook and pen from my satchel while we spent one hot morning touring around the Palantine Hill, the famous Roman ruins of the age of Caesar, crumbling columns and weather-worn arches, and meandering cobblestone paths dating back literal thousands of years and forming an archeological site the size of a medium-sized town. The colluseum, yes, that one, was somewhere to my back and I had turned my attention to a vista of shapes and ruins and freestanding pillars with so much life bursting from their long dead tales that the ink flowed from my pen and onto the page almost without thought. And all around me tour groups walked and wandered and lingered and looked and even, yes, snapped photos of the kooky Canadian sitting on a stone ledge sketching.

Every one of those sketches now lives in a sketchbook on my shelf, but every single one of them emerged from an authentic moment of public exposure that culminated in a piece of art with more weight and memory imbued into it than anything I could ever draw with more time and precision back in my home studio.

I don’t know if it was performance pressure or the time crunch of my family wanting to press on with the sightseeing or maybe just the heat of the sun on my head, but each of those sketches means more to me than any photo or video I took on that trip.

Each sprung from a moment of inspiration. Each emerged from a second of forethought and virtually no planning. Each was nothing more than an opportunity met with the preparedness of an open mind and a ready pen. Each flowed from authenticity.

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity this month as I try to wrap my head around what it means to capture an opportunity, an idea, a sound, an image, or anything creative. What does it mean to be open to inspiration and how does that translate into something more real on the page or the screen?  I think anyone who has ever wandered with a ready pen and sketchbook through a crowded European city might have a good shot at understanding just what I mean, too.