July 2016

Mutanti‘s concert on Monday night was held in the  (confusingly named!) venue,  PRAHA / Fórum pro architekturu a média, which was small but very well designed and had a nice intimate atmosphere. There was no raised stage but with the ceiling spotlights turned off I was able to use my Tagtool drawing to provide lighting for Jirka and Honza as well as covering the whole of the wall behind them.Their programme contained most of the songs that they performed in June at at the Music Club Střelnice in Klatovy, but in a different order – on this occasion the song, ‘Chernobyl’ (above) was followed by ‘Uncle Honza’, the song about a girl on a swing.

As most of Mutanti’s songs are both fast paced and quite short (about 3 minutes), managing the transitions between them is quite challenging. Where it was possible I tried to use some of the drawing for one song as a background for the next, either by partial fading out or drawing over it, to avoid having too many abrupt ‘pauses’ in the visuals.After this urban landscape I had to begin a completely new drawing for Mutanti’s next (hip hop) song, ‘Primitive Instincts’… …but this provided a suitable background (and gave me a full 10 minutes) to develop this drawing of the ‘big black guy’, who was the subject of the longer song, ‘Discotheque’ which followed.

After another fade to black, a complete change of atmosphere and some more abstract drawing to accompany the next two songs…

…’Andele’ (above) and then something dark and slightly mysterious for ‘Winnie the Pooh’.Mutanti ended their concert with a song about a ‘Lonely Bambi’ – cue another change of mood……and then it was time for a well deserved beer before packing up the equipment and heading for home!

On Saturday night we were at the beautiful  lakeside at Svitavy, drawing to accompany the performance by the Czech group, Prago Union. They were playing on the main stage at the festival which meant that I was able to use the 10000 lumen Panasonic projector mounted in the sound tent – which was very, very nice! Dima set up his tripod and camera alongside the projector to shoot photos at 5 second intervals in order to make a stop frame video of the performance so I have had a huge number of photos to sort through. I made an album which I have posted on Facebook, but I’ve chosen a few for this post.

There was a big and very enthusiastic audience – lots of people waving their hands in front of the projector beam, even having a ‘piggy-back’ to get a better view, which produced some interesting shadows on my drawing. But even though I was standing on a box it wasn’t always easy for me to see the whole of the stage so sometimes I had to rely on my little monitor to know where to continue to draw.For the music of this Czech hip-hop band I chose to draw mostly shadowy figures in vaguely urban environments – which is one of my favourite subjects for drawing….

…and then I used this as a background for some large portrait heads.

Prago Union’s set was 90 minutes long, which is quite a long time to do continuous performance drawing so I made several different drawings during the set, each of which I developed over more than one song before fading out and starting again.

The 1000 lumen projector easily cut through the stage lighting and the different coloured beams produced some dramatic effects which gave added interest to the drawing…

…as well as illuminating the musicians and the audience.

I  hope to post some video later but to end this post here are three photos from my last drawing sequence.

…from 9 to 18 July our ‘holiday’ in Slovenia, visiting Ljubljana and Maribor, traveling through the beautiful Istrian countryside and enjoying concerts at the Floating Castle Festival as well as doing lots and lots of Tagtool drawing – seven different sessions in ten days!  For this overview I have chosen just one photo from each session – but I will select more photos for some later postings.

Podcerkev – drawing on the roof of the building behind the stage at the Ethno Histeria World Orchestra concert at Ars Viva‘s open air amphitheatre.

Cerknica – concert with members of Ethno Orchestra held in a big barn in the centre of the town (with a spectacular thunderstorm as accompaniment!)

Floating Castle Festival – concert in the big cupola with Israeli band, Hayelala.

Floating Castle Festival – performance outside the (locked) cave at the castle.

Floating castle Festival – drawing on the façade of Grad Snežnik at the big open air Friday night Ethno Histeria concert.

Floating Castle Festival – Saturday night concert under the arches of the castle gateway – with my drawing reflected in the lake.

Ljubljana – at Tovarna ROG, an improvised Tagtool drawing session in the courtyard alongside an evening of poetry reading.

I have a lot more photos from these sessions, some of which Dima has already posted on Facebook, but I will write more about this trip in a few days.  Now it is the festival season and we are very busy – on Saturday at Rosnicka Festival in the Czech Republic then Monday in Brno, so I will not have much time for the blog!

Friday 24 and Saturday 25 June – two nights of Tagtool drawing at 48 Stunden Neukölln Festival on the big wall at the MBU Skatepark where Ilan Katin and I did a bit of guerrilla action back in February.

Saturday night

I began the evening’s drawing with this landscape……and as more people arrived started to add some figures in the foreground.This time there was a bigger audience than on Friday night, with people standing on the path outside the skatepark to see the performance as well as sitting inside.The thunderstorm that was promised in the weather forecast didn’t happen (I’m glad to say) but we put up the gazebo just in case. This made a nice ‘stage’ for both the Tagtool and the two musicians that we met on Friday night who offered to come and play with us. To have live music was a lovely surprise – and a real bonus both for us and the audience!As I developed this drawing by adding more figures and ‘removing’ the background landscape Dima took these close up shots…

…showing the transformation of my initial romantic landscape into a much darker subject.

Here is another of Dima’s photos from this session, his camera angle juxtaposing the painted steel plate figures on the perimeter fence of the skatepark with my drawing on the wall behind it – nice!   Then it was time for a complete change of mood – cue some joyous colour and lively animation from Ilan! Although the photos below give some indication of this performance, only video could have captured Ilan’s glowing and dancing calligraphic drawing – so next time we must remember to pack a video camera….The musicians were happy to continue playing and our audience showed no signs of going home so I did another drawing….this time a cityscape…

…with a man walking his dog among the graffiti!

As we were packing up to go home a group of people came up to ask how the Tagtool worked so Dima put on the projector again and I did a quick drawing  by way of illustration.After this scary finale it was definitely -‘time to go home’!