In Berlin (part 2)

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’!