Live painting is drawing under social pressure, with music, light and people changing the conditions while the image is still being made.
The room moves with the image
A live painting is not a finished image enlarged for an audience. The audience is part of the condition. Music changes the pace, people interrupt the frame, light changes colour and the work must stay open while it is being made.
That makes live art a different kind of drawing. It is less protected than studio work, but that exposure is the point. The mark has to communicate before it has explained itself.
Whole Festival and the Beach Stage
For Whole Festival, Eva Garland was the creative director and hired me as the painter. I painted approximately 40% of the Beach Stage. The role was specific. I was not supplying a generic decoration package. I was carrying my authored language into a large public setting.
A festival stage is temporary architecture. People meet it while arriving, dancing, waiting, filming and leaving. The image becomes part of the memory of the place rather than a separate object that people must stop to admire.
Drawing among clubs and artists
Club and artist-run spaces matter to this way of working. At Klunkerkranich, live drawing, a jazz jam and DJs brought drawing into the social structure of the night. At DA SWAMP, live work sat alongside tattoos, objects and an exhibition room.
I am interested in the point where an audience stops being a crowd and becomes a temporary group. Live painting gives people something to watch become real without turning the room into a lecture.
What a partner is commissioning
A partner commissioning live art is commissioning more than an image. They are commissioning attention, atmosphere, pace and a record of an event that could not have existed in exactly the same way elsewhere.
The useful brief includes the place, audience, sound, timing and reason for the gathering. From there, I can find the form that lets the event remain itself while leaving a physical and editorial record.
Credits
- Original Sketchy Shona studio editorial based on documented Whole Festival, Klunkerkranich and DA SWAMP records.