I've been meaning to blog various things recently, but they'll have to wait until after next week. Tomorrow I'm running a writing workshop and on Thursday we have Fear of the Dark. It's going to be a busy week but I'm as excited as I am nervous.
I took time off last night for White Night. I'd slept through Saturday afternoon (I have a weekend napping problem) so it took me a while to get into things. I wandered around loving the pianos placed in the street and accidentally finding a singer on a North Street balcony doing the famous bit from Carmina Burana.
I met up with Kay Sexton and went to Fabrica. There was a fantastic atmosphere at the gallery, with a cafe and lots of drawing activities.
Nobody likes a stick-in-the-mud, so I tried drawing one of the faces in the gallery. Drawing fascinates me as, like writing, you aim to represent a reality by favouring certain aspects of a thing. Extracting significant visual information from a face was fascinating. The more I tried to sketch the faces in the gallery, the more I noticed shapes and curves, becoming more sensitive to the way the faces were composed, how different they looked when their angle shifted. While the faces might not have been recognisable as the ones I was sketching, they did at least look like faces, which was a pleasant surprise.
White Night was fun but, like a summer festival, it was as much about walking around and queueing as anything else. Still, it was lovely to see so many people out and to bump into old friends. I didn't have the stamina to stay up till the end (a dawn choral work on the beach near the fortune of war) and went home fairly early.
(Sadly I couldn't get in to Jake Spicer's Drawing Cards from the Deck session – preparations pictured below – but I think I will go along to the Brighton Life Drawing Sessions soon and try some more drawing)
I also went to see AK/DK on Friday night at the Leisure Sports Discotheque, where they played with :Kinema: and Trance Farmer. It was a great night and I stayed out longer than I should have done. Here is a photograph of AK/DK:
Two drummers! Two drummers! And synths.