The Exhibition - Part 1

Welcome back, Everyone!

…and also farewell to anyone for whom this update will serve as a useful reminder to finally unsubscribe! - honestly, I Get It - This wonderful little newsletter has been slightly forgotten of late, so I wouldn’t hold it against you!

(On the plus side, now is your chance to unsubscribe guilt-free!)

RIGHT! - Now that that’s out of the way, gather around my handful of remaining subscribers, and let’s get stuck into this long overdue update!

First up…

The Exhibition!

Yuuuup! After doing for this thing for 8 years or so, I FINALLY got around to getting some stuff up on a wall and telling people to come and look at it while drinking wine.

I know, I know - it’s missing people.

Of course, it wasn’t just me - in fact, I wouldn’t have done any of this if it weren’t for the amazing Anne Derian, who I teamed up with for this exhibition.

…which was our first hurdle.

You see, Anne and I have very different styles of art…

So our first task was to find a common denominator for our art, (which has absolutely nothing in common)

In the end, we realised we both have backgrounds in Architecture and to a degree, it might have been Architecture that led us both to where we are now.

And so, an exhibition was born!

We even retained our individual styles by splitting the flyer straight down the middle.

Once we had the date and place locked in (more on that later), so began two months of almost non-stop work, churning out as much art as possible before the big opening.

Fittingly, I hadn’t worked this hard and furiously since Architecture School. At a certain point, I was taking breaks to ice my drawing hand which was starting to resemble a gnarled and haunted uprooted tree.

When my hand was operational, I realised creating art for an exhibition opened up a whole new world of possibility and potential fun, like demanding that people buy my art, but making that art…

I also realised the exhibition might be a good opportunity to solve some other current issues in my life, which is how this piece came about…

Then of course I thought I’d better put some Berlin-specific comics in, which is how I ended up spending an entire afternoon drawing thirty very slightly different wheely bins.

Actually… I got stuck right into drawing bins. Even the iconic Berlin orange bin made an appearance…

Or what about the German language? Surely that should get mentioned in the exhibition I thought, (After all, it rarely passes my own lips, so it’s the least I could do for a Berlin-based exhibition)…

And so, the opening date very quickly got closer and closer…

But then…. Disaster.

Of all things, FOOTBALL.

While we’d been diligently working away, the The UEFA European Football Championship, aka The Euroes was being held in Germany.

This hadn’t been cause for concern, but just a week before the exhibition Germany would win against Denmark, thereby sending Germany to the quarter-final which was being held not only the same day as our exhibition but at the exact hour as well.

If it was any other country, we’d be fine! - but Germany getting in, would mean that at 6 pm on July 5th, the last thing 90% of Berlin would be doing was standing in a small gallery looking at meticulously designed art and stick figures.

At this point however, it was too late to change the dates and so we carried on, hoping that the majority of our arty guestlist didn’t like football that much…

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And that… for now, is where I’m going to leave it…

Will the exhibition happen? Will the people turn up? Will my mangled hand go back to a normal-looking hand? Who knows?! All will be revealed in the next installment!

Till then…

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