recently I have been learning about spreadsheets and databases, marketing copy and risk assessment forms.... I have just started working at JW3, co-ordinating bits of the art studio, putting together events and altogether having a wonderful creative time with some great people. And learning spreadsheets and various bits of software. Bless the elves who designed artifax, that should make work easier and simpler. but bless the patient elf who had to train me to use it. I really shouldn’t, when faced with technology, think I should come up with scenarios that it isn’t designed for, and get gleeful satisfaction when the patient elf says “hmm that’s a good point... I’ll get back to you” (I also am this annoying in Talmud classes)... because I am after all, an artist. And artists, as I hear on a regular basis, are different. in not a good way.
but today I remembered I was an artist in good way. today I did a series of drawings in a dance studio and it was glorious. My drawings weren’t but the experience of drawing was. Thanks to my friend, Barak Marshall, a guest choreographer at the Rambert Dance Company, I was lucky enough to see the work in progress, sit quietly in the corner and just draw. Barak and I met at an artist retreat, appropriately called Asylum. It was an artist retreat but it was really a gathering of all those who find themselves being cast as different, in not a good way, when they are in any other setting.
So there I was, in a room full of dancers who could do amazing things with their bodies, while my body was getting used to sitting on the hard floor, getting a numb bum, pins and needles in my legs, and getting ink all over my fingers while struggling trying to capture the fleeting gestures and idosyncratic movements, making mistakes, making a mess, just making... as I said, having a glorious time.
here are some of the drawings from today. A HUGE thank you to Barak and the people at Rambert Dance Company for allowing me into the private working space of the rehearsal studio. When I draw dancers, and it has been a while so I am a bit rusty, I tend to focus in on one dancer at a time, study their movements and gestures, get into their flow, and tend to blank out the others. After much practice at drawing and seeing I can widen the focus and start to map out the total space and the dance within. but not today. They were rehearsing a new piece for a performance at Sadlers Wells in October. and from what I can make out from the individual moments the whole will be something worth seeing, without any blanking out.
warming up with a couple of pencil drawings... I used to draw a bunch of musicians, and one of them always ALWAYS would say: do you have enough lead in your pencil... and then laugh heartily at his own wit. idiot.
...but today I didn't have enough lead in my pencil. I'm the idiot. had to use the fountain pen.
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