June 2021 Update & A Fond Farewell

Greetings to my Ottawa urban sketcher friends. It's Cindi Moynahan-Foreman here with two important announcements about the Ottawa urban sketching group and an important technical announcement for email subscribers to this blog.

Centretown house (Lisgar ST.) scheduled for demolition. Mixed media by Cindi Moynahan-Foreman

Changes For Our Email Subscribers

 In April, Google announced that the Feedburner service (that has been generating Ottawa Urban Sketchers emails about this blog) would be discontinued in July 2021.

I operate several blogs and I have been researching alternatives to Feedburner and options that would be best: migrate all current subscribers OR request subscribers to sign up all over again?

In the case of my other blogs, I will be migrating them to follow.it. I chose follow.it because:

• you can switch an unlimited number of existing followers for free
• the basic level of subscription is 100% free for both emails and RSS readers
  
• it's a mature operation and not a start-up
  
• it takes the EU GDPR seriously - unclear about applicability for Canadian privacy/data protection
  
• it offers choice to the follower re what their preference is for how they want to follow
• N.B. above points originally appeared on blog Making A Mark  along with several other recommendations
  

Given, the announcement below, I am hoping to hear your feedback before deciding what to do with the list of Ottawa Urban Sketcher subscribers which currently stands at approximately 100. 

By way of comparison, there are 824 followers to the Ottawa Urban Sketchers Facebook page and 805 members of the Ottawa Urban Sketchers Facebook group.

Ottawa Urban Sketchers: Future Events

In July 2020, I corresponded with the two co-administrators of the Ottawa Urban Sketchers (USk) (Colin White and Kristina Corre) to inform them that, "after much reflection, I intend to step back as the organizer of the Ottawa Urban sketching events."

Even though we were still under restrictions due to the COVID pandemic (not knowing at the time that it would continue for yet another year), I wanted to be proactive and start the conversation about finding our USk event organizer replacement.

"Husky on Bank St." from series "Pets In Windows" by Cindi Moynahan-Foreman

By September 2020, Colin White had recruited Ottawa artist Bette Belanger following a telephone conversation about some of her ideas, including sketching in cars in the winter, and doing excursions a little further afield from Ottawa.

Presently, in Ontario, we are still under lock-down (Step 1 of the Roadmap to reopen). No public sketching events have been organized for almost one year and a half. This will be changing soon. Stay tuned. Best of luck to the our new event organizers and I hope to be able to participate occasionally in the future.

I intend to maintain this blog indefinitely as an archive of our sketching adventures since 2015.

Lessons Learned 

As the administrator of the Ottawa urban sketchers and an event organizer for the past six years, I have learned a few lessons that I think are worth passing on.

• Gender matters
• Diversity matters
• Accessibility matters
• The manifesto matters ... (COVID really tested this)
• The organizer's role
  

Slideshow video link https://youtu.be/wbC514m7Bxc 

I would express my heartfelt thanks to everyone for showing up. That's always what inspired me to organize the next event. The fact that so many people always showed up. Cheerful familiar faces and new faces too!

I'm going to miss that. I'm going to miss the friendly, familiar faces of the Ottawa urban sketchers. In the future, I hope to see you out there with your sketchbook on the street!

Thank You Ottawa Urban Sketchers!

Cindi Moynahan-Foreman sketching in Edinburgh, Scotland Edinburgh 2019 (... “a dream in masonry and living rock”) in the rain

 

Link: https://ottawaurbansketchers.blogspot.com/2019/04/ottawa-urban-sketchers-featured-in.html