September 2016

On Friday 9 September the museum held a day long outdoor event,  ‘Malá slavnost lesa a dřeva‘, to accompany their current special exhibition about forests. This was a family-oriented event held in the garden behind the museum with daytime activities for children, a puppet show and in the evening an open air concert by Czech musicians  Konvrzek & Kalivoda.Above – it was a beautiful cloudless evening and the concert began before it was properly dark. The combination of the dark brick of the museum wall, bright outdoor lighting of the path leading to the cafe bar and the illumination of the stage made for extremely difficult conditions for Tagtool drawing!  None the less, people seemed to enjoy the ghostly images accompanying the music and I did several drawings both during and after the concert.I did the demonstration drawing below during the interval to show how the Tagtool worked, for some people who were interested in it and had not seen it before.Because of the ambient light it was not possible to use any transparency in my drawings and make only big bold images. Drawing in black and white was really the best option, and although I did try to use some colour, the dark brick made everything look very dull.I had not been able to draw the kind of landscape and forest backgrounds that I had hoped to for this event, but I did enjoy the music –  and the audience seemed happy with the performance too!

On 21 August we drove from Šumava to Plzeň where Vložte kočku were playing at the street music festival. The stage had a white tarpaulin roof  and a light grey fine mesh rear ‘wall’ through which the contours of the building behind were dimly visible. I was able to draw over the whole stage and the roof – two different surfaces which produced some interesting effects, a lot of distortion in the drawing on the roof and slightly out of focus double images behind the band. I began by using black and white with quite a lot of transparency as  opaque colours looked quite different on the two surfaces, the roof being much brighter.Dima took some photos from the side of the stage where the effect of the mesh background on the Tagtool drawing can be seen clearly….…and in this ‘behind the scenes shot’ the shadows of the musicians and their instruments produced a ghostly, almost surreal effect. Dima took a lot of photos at the concert – what follows is just a small selection.Here is a close-up shot to end this post. I have many more photos and also some pieces of video which I’ll try to post later – when I have some ‘free’ time!