Art Is Community : Community Is Art

A creative collaboration

The last couple of weekends have been hectic, and good fun. As well as celebrating the third anniversary of the free art project, I’ve been helping to celebrate the launch of some excellent new music, produced by some good friends in the band ELTEL.

I first became aware of their album launch way back in the Autumn of 2018, when the band kindly approached me and asked if I’d make some art for the front and back cover of the album. I had previously sent one of the band members a card which I’d adapted to reflect the ELTEL black and white striped style, and we further adapted that design for the front cover.

While preparing to make the art, I spent time reading through lyrics, and listening to a couple of early track recordings. There are a few food references in the words, so for the back cover, I designed the piece on the right, titled ‘The Last Thing On The Table’. These two 12″ square canvases were handed over to the band in November 2018 and I’ve been sworn to secrecy about their existence, until now.

There were three album launch events over the past two weekends, and I made it to two of them, at The Lamb in Surbiton, and at The Brook in Wallington. As well as getting to hear all the new music live, I also saw a piece of my art blown up onto a 6 foot square banner. On both nights, I was also given the unexpected and unscripted pleasure of introducing the band and the excellent Dirty Carols who accompanied them.

The gig at The Brook was really special, a sold out intimate venue, packed with great music and lovely people. I felt really privileged to see my work on show, and to be able to introduce excellent musicians to an excellent audience. We gathered together for a photo afterwards, and the bands put their producer Andy Brook, and me, front and centre. What a lovely thing to do. Thank you for including me, and thanks also, for trusting me, what a powerful thing to do.

The new album contains ten wonderfully crafted, quirky, beautiful tunes. You can download and listen to it here. It’s excellent.

Art is community : Community is art <3

Developing and Sustaining A Culture of Creativity

This is the beginning of a curation of some recent talks, projects and workshops on developing and sustaining a culture of creativity in the workplace. This space will grow into a mixture of words, pictures, and practice, and the first thing I want to share is a series of annotated images, which I used to support short talks at Workplace Trends and Clerkenwell Design Week. There were four talks in all, each one slightly different, yet similar enough that I hope this one set of notes covers all the main points.

In summary the talks focused on:

  • Scene setting : some evidence about why creativity at work is important
  • Reluctance : some thoughts on why we don’t use creative practice more readily
  • Getting started : A few ideas on how to bring business and the arts together
  • Creative prompts : Simple steps to spark and sustain the creative process
  • Age of Artists : An introduction to the evolving Age of Artists framework
  • The Free Art Project : Be curious, start something, keep going
  • Reading list
  • Thoughts on managing a creative culture : Taken from the book Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Here’s a link to all the details. Sustaining a Culture of Creativity. I hope you find them useful and if you’ve any questions – feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line.

More to follow…

Life From A Window : Our London

Keira’s school recently had a ‘Take Your Daughter To Work’ day, which we managed to coincide with an experimental day of live painting at the London offices of AECOM. We were invited to explore the theme of ‘Our London’ for the day, and we duly headed into town on the Overground train during rush hour (I was keen to give Keira the full commuting experience!) to get to work.

We set up in the main reception area on the 16th floor, overlooking the city of London. The view from the window is spectacular – even on a wet cloudy day like the one we had. Keira and I were keen to contrast the wide panoramic view of a wealthy city as seen from the window, with a more close up view of the streets immediately surrounding the building we worked in. We also wanted to involve other people in our work.

People began to show curiosity in what we were doing, so we engaged them in conversations about the view, and about their experiences of London and the local area. We spoke about how the view changes according to time of day, seasons, weather etc. Several folk suggested a series of works to reflect these changes. The view at night came up a few times, and we sought to represent that in a painting. We also invited people to take photographs out of the window, without being any more specific than that.

People also spoke with us about the streets of London, and transport came up a fair bit so we made a street scene using paint for the ‘map’ and polaroids taken by Keira at street level, to represent some of what we heard in the conversations.

We made some geometric abstractions of buildings/cityscape – and experimented with some tracing overlays too, as a way of acknowledging the different ways people described ‘Our London’.

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We had planned to turn everyone’s photographs into a collage cityscape, and we ran into some technical printing difficulties on the day, so that part of the project remains a work in progress.

Life From A Window

The idea was to invite people to engage, thank you to the many people who responded to that invitation. We used what we learned to inform and conduct some small experiments, and we observed how we and others responded to what was going on.

We had a really interesting time. There was no grand plan at this stage, just an opportunity to drop something different into the working day, a small stone which set off a series of ripples.

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without Keira, and the support of Malcolm, Hilary, and Sharon at AECOM, thank you all. The team at reception supported us well, and encouraged folk to interact with us, thank you. Thanks to everyone who took time to speak with us, suggest ideas, and take photographs.