Life Drawing again!
I found a Life Drawing class at the end of 2011 and after a very long hiatus indeed, got the opportunity to hone my skills in this area once again. This year, the old venue ground to a halt, due to models cancelling at the last minute and so on. I was sorry about this, as one thing I enjoyed about the atmosphere at the venue was that it was a little bit more international: neither exclusively Hungarian nor exclusively expat in favour of any other particular nationality. That made it more easy-going for me – everyone spoke a little Hungarian, a little English, so there was a lot more room to meet each other half way, somehow.
More recently another individual has offered up his home as a venue for life drawing classes. That is Peter Fekete, who does not sound remotely Hungarian. I recently attended his exhibition opening and his blog can be seen here.
His work reminds me a little of that of an old friend and fellow of mine – Dave Patchett.
Peter’s work does not have the satirical edge that Dave’s has, but the canvass paintings filled panoramic detail of so many human souls inhabiting various hells does invite comparison.
Dave and I used to exhibit together with a group of other artists from Hillfieds in Coventry
Drawing is followed by plentiful offerings of pizza and wine and once again, the atmosphere seems pretty easy-going and congenial. This is one of my latest drawings:
I am still working on completing older pieces and repairing others before moving on. My recent experiences with artist’s co-operatives in Budapest have at times been disheartening to say the least. Insiders have occasionally proven to be aggressively territorial of their position as big fish in small ponds. Others appear to start with heady-sounding intentions of changing the closed-shop snobbery of this marvellous city into a vibrantly open hive of creativity and bringing Art back into the centre of people’s lives, reclaiming the artist’s role as virtually Shamanic, and so on, only for this quickly to become what sounds a whole lot more like ‘try to do more white ones, your red ones aren’t getting enough votes and that blue doesn’t go down either. Not that your red ones aren’t any good, but……’
It was suggested to me I had fallen victim to the tyranny of the Market.
Taking the ‘treat your great Soul work on high as something to be be Marketed’ does appear to offer hope, a solution to the old Starving Artist who might otherwise find the closed shops of the Right Schools and Who you Know a formidable barrier.
The Marketing thing can also seem incredibly reductionist. I suspect that there are individuals somewhere in the world who would be happy to be the ones to part me from my larger peices, just as I have occasionally found individuals willing to buy my A4-size collage work on paper. I just wish I knew how to reach these.