Yesterday I had a meeting with Alison and Graeme from the Harbour Arts Centre here in Irvine. The meeting was to start to discuss my plans for the forthcoming exhibition and big drawing project, scheduled for the end of November through until 12th January.
Starting point, the Dom drawing, Speyer 2010
There were a good number of things I wanted to check with them not least the practical side of doing the big drawing. I wanted, in particular, to check just how much access I’d get to do the work…… creating a 4.5m x 1.5m drawing is going to take quite a lot of time. Thankfully I needn’t have worried as I should be able to get to work on the drawing for up to 12 hours most days and should be able to work some of the days over the Christmas / New Year period if I’m running late! This is quite a relief as I was thinking I’d only have about five weeks in which to complete everything…now it seems, I’ll have nearer 6 – 7 weeks.
Test drawings in my studio
As you know, as well as creating the drawing in the gallery, I’ll also be holding a standard exhibition of smaller works and we’ve decided that on the preview evening, I’ll speak about my work and the drawing project for five or so minutes so that everyone has an idea of what they’re looking at and what will be taking place throughout the course of the exhibition. Slightly more unusual though is that we’ve also agreed to hold a ‘Post view’ at the end of the exhibition. By this stage, I should with a modicum of luck and a bit of hard work, have finished the big drawing and it seems a good idea to invite everyone back to see what it looks like. I’ve also proposed that I donate the finished drawing to the North Ayrshire Council art collection and the post view evening could be the ideal opportunity to formally hand the drawing over.
Among other topics discussed was the idea of setting up a web cam so that we can promote the project to an audience outside of Ayrshire. Having something that would be ‘live’ however, made us all a little nervous I think and after some thought Graeme suggested that instead, we set up a time lapse camera that would record the work regularly throughout a 7 hour period. At the end of each day, the resulting footage could be checked and uploaded to a website so that folk could follow the progress of the drawing on-line….but just not ‘live’. It seems a very good idea and I’ll be very happy with that. I’m leaving Graeme to sort all this technical stuff out…..needless to say I’m not very good with things like that!
More test drawings
Alison also asked me whether it’d be OK if she arranges for some schools to visit while I’m working on the drawing. She’s suggested that I could perhaps do a formal talk in the Harbour Arts Centre theatre the same day. This seems like another good idea and I’m more than happy to do this. Over the last few years I’ve been asked to speak about my work on several occasions and although it involves quite a lot of preparatory work, it has always been worth while. Indeed, I’ve recently had two enquiries to work as a guest speaker which is quite exciting especially as one of them is abroad. Anyway, more of that another time; for the moment I have enough to think about with this project. As you can see though, things are well under way and I’m really looking forward to starting the drawing in five months or so time. I’ll keep you up to date on how things progress.
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