27 April 2011

Quiksilver Welsh Nationals 23-24 April

Great people, great weather, great surf, very great comp... and some guy painting on everyone's stuff!





21 April 2011

The Edusk8 crew do another bit on the wall




And this time, it's personal!

This week the Edusk8 crew got to do the second session of the big front wall at Mount Hawke Skate Park in Cornwall. To read about the first session and Edusk8 at Mount Hawke click here.

We took a slightly different approach this time. To warm up, we doodled. Ten of us drew whatever we felt like drawing, with a variety of marker pens, on our own sheets of card for well over an hour. Amazingly, most of this was in complete silence. They needed hardly any prompting.

We wanted to create something that had a peice of it created by each of us. And we came up with an idea for a totem pole-type image. or a totem pile, as someone suggested.

So we played the surrealist's game Exquisite Corpse with a theme of a totem pole, but with ten pictures rotating round the table simultaneously.

Then we all chose our favourite peice from the ten finished pictures and stuck them together so we each had designed a peice of the image.

After some lunch, we went out into the bright sunshine (and the hottest car park in the history of mankind!) and painted it on the wall.

15 April 2011

Young artists at CN4C activities day.

Cornwall Neighbourhoods for Change (CN4C) is a tenant led regeneration organisation tackling issues connected with social conditions and the local environment.

Yesterday they held a massive activities day at the Astro turf pitch in Penzance for local young people from some of the more disadvantaged communities in the area.

A drawingonthings workshop was on hand for the creative and discerning.


We had a huge sheet of tarpaulin as a roof, just incase the rain (which was sitting in huge dark clouds above us the whole time) actually fell.


So, the theme for the workshop was "outdoors".


I helped a bit with some outlines and details but all of the designs and ideas were from those taking part and all of the colouring was completed by them too!


Amazingly, the rain held off until we were packing up.


There was a huge amount of effort from the young people involved plus a lot of laughter and serious skill development! Vibrant results like this highlight the importance of art activities in everyday life.

The artwork is to be hung in the CN4C offices in Redruth.

14 April 2011

Edusk8 crew kick-start giant wall project!

Mount Hawke Skatepark outside walls, Day 1: Edusk8...

Part of the secret of Mount Hawke's success is the education facilities. The world famous rural Cornish skatepark has a great set-up for young people, who would otherwise not be in education, employment or training of any kind. They call this side of the skatepark 'Edusk8'.

This year I will be helping various groups of people who use the skatepark to decorate the massive blue wall in the front car park. The Edusk8 crew went first and his project leapt into action on Tuesday this week.

We had mammoth doodle collaborations in the conference room first and then went out and continued on the wall. Everybody who was there took part and many had never used spray paint before and quite a few were telling me they couldn't draw when we started.

We got so much done in one day. I was amazed at how fast everybody worked!



11 April 2011

Skate Artwork Barefoot Games Skate Comp 2011

Yesterday at the Eden Project's Barefoot Games skate and scoot comp at Mount Hawke Skatepark:




This minute 100s of newly spray-painted skateboards and scooters are flying round the streets and skateparks of Cornwall!


The Door Of Perception came too, capturing important ideas, doodles and visual imagery from the skaters, which were then painted on their skates and scoots.

01 April 2011

Introducing: The Door Of Perception!


This is a new drawingonthings workshop where spontaneous doodles are drawn on a freestanding door by any number of people present.
Sounds simple. But, is it?

Yesterday I took"The Door Of Perception" to The Eden Project's EDEN CAFE in St Austell's new White River Place for local young people visiting the cafe to draw on as part of a Barefoot Games workshop. The ideas and images that emerge will be discussed and used in further community projects and activities.


Why "Door Of Perception"?
Since William Blake inscribed the immortal lines in his poem The marriage of Heaven and Hell into a slab of molten granite on top of a ferocious volcano somewhere around the dawn of time, man has held the humble door as a totem symbol of our understanding of the universe. Blake:

"When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite."

Author and creative adventurer Aldous Huxley read Blake during his A-levels in the 1940s, and used the term for the title of a book in the 50's. Rumor has it that he gave a copy of his book to a young Jim Morrison at a party on Venice Beach ten years later.

Jim was looking for a slogan at the time as he had recently began printing t-shirts with ink and a simple silk screen press he had bought from Andy Warhol who was recently at Venice on his summer vacation from New York.

Jim went on to sell thousands of CLEAN THE DOORS t-shirts to people on the beach that summer. The slogan had CLEAN written in small, red letters and THE DOORS in big, bold, black capitals underneath.
A somewhat bizarre motto for a celebrated "genius" to come up with, but the hippies loved it!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the red ink Warhol had sold Jim was a dodgy batch he had made while experimenting with tomato soup, and it faded in the sun!

Morrison was in an unknown band at the time called The Chairs, and they were going nowhere, fast! When the band were looking for a new name, keyboard player Ray Manzarek pointed to the hippies walking round in t-shirts with just THE DOORS written on the front in bold, black helvetica font... and the rest is history.

So it seemed to me perfect sense to carry a phrase with such lineage forward into a new era.