 |  |
"This is going to blow your mind", the man whispered as I passed him on the stairway going up to the second floor of the Brooklyn loft. I felt like a real square. With my knapsack swung over my shoulder and my helmet head hair I looked like I should be en route to parochial school and not to Michael Alan’s Drawathon. A drawing event "where art meets activism and the still life model is banished in favor of the improvisational performance art, music, theater, and communal art making". At least that is what it said on the website.
I pushed open the door to the second floor and found myself in an enormous gallery. The walls were covered with paintings and oversized photographs, and light projection installations flickered across the walls. Beside a mobile made from dismembered Barbie doll limbs casting silhouettes of figures on the wall was a paper sculpture. It was draped from the ceiling and dripped down the walls to the floor creating a tunnel leading further into the space.
Through the paper tunnel, at the far end of the loft, I could see the models surrounded by artists sketching and painting fiendishly. Some of the models wore elaborate headdresses and costumes; others had on masks, their naked bodies painted. The models climbed on ladders, spun on top of tables, crawled and danced to music which sounded like like squeaky swing sets mixed with African drumbeats.I wish I could say that I was not unnerved by the scene, but at that moment I really missed the convention of the Upper East Side drawing group. It took me a few minutes to process everything, but once I accepted my own discomfort and focused on trying to capture some of the elaborate and bizarre scene through my drawings, I had fun.
Song of the day Venus In Furs by The Velvet Underground .
Something I like... Peter Kuper’s Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico.
