Zoom and Plein Air Drop-in Groups – click on the links below
Tuesday and Friday morning Pleinairists
Tuesday Afternoon Short Pose Drop-in Life Drawing
Wednesday Morning – Drop-in Life Drawing and Painting
Wednesday Afternoon – Drop-in Portraiture
Saturday Morning – Drop-in Life Drawing and Painting
A few thank yous
It’s tough at the moment in the arts community, particularly for those of us who woke up on the 23rd March with no business and no income. Models and tutors who rely upon working in studios with artists had to do some pretty quick thinking and for some of them that meant streaming on Zoom. Ironically, some have done exceedingly well and models particularly have benefited from sharing the spoils of Zoomed events filled with locked down artists. Many of them stream from their homes, I’m sure you’ve done a few yourself so you’ll know the sort of thing I’m talking about.
For our part, we’ve reconfigured our studio so that we can stream a model with good quality lighting and video. It works rather well and despite the occasional hiccup (computers die, fuseboards blow and sonic feedback provides space echo effects from time to time!) it provides strong source material for artists to work from and a sense of community which sustains us. In the photo above you can see how it works: at the camera is Valeria, who some of you will have painted, wearing her other hat as film maker, as she frames Floria at a recent short pose session. Valeria is looking at the big studio monitor which also helps the models to understand what the artists are seeing.
Whilst this is all great fun, it is our fervent hope that come the Autumn we will be able to welcome people back into the studio, at least on a limited basis. We are doing our darnedest to stay in business and the modest income we gain from these events helps us to do that and to support those models daring enough to be on camera.
So we’d like to say thank you for sticking by us. Thank you for putting up with our production bumps as we work this all out. Thank you for supporting us and our community by attending digital drop-ins and classes. Thank you for not demanding immediate repayment of course fees and for accepting Zoom classes as a substitute for missed classes.
Goodness knows what will remain at the end of this cultural apocalypse but independent voices, well embedded in the digital world should do OK: here’s a fab rant on the disappearance of culture by Jonathan Pie. (If you’re in a hurry skip to the sixth minute).
On the Wednesday 1st July the redoubtable George Butler is giving a free talk about his forthcoming trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, you are invited to join him for the talk or the trip. It’s clearly not for everyone (there may be a bit of bounding from rock to rock) but promises to be spectacular and intense. You can find out more here
An Introduction to Life Drawing on Zoom
This course got off to a good start last Tuesday, other than the tutor being either inaudible or invisible for the first few minutes! We’ve ironed that one out now and students understood the concepts well and did some good work.
We still have room for a couple more students so we thought we’d make you an offer. The first two weeks of the course look at schematic drawing, so much of the ground we covered last week we’ll be going over again this week albeit from a different angle. If you were to sign up for this course and start tomorrow, you won’t have missed much and we’ll give you a 10% discount making it £85.50 for nine, two hour tutored life drawing classes. How about it? You can sign up here and use the discount code PESTE3 to get the better price.
Summer Term now 9 weeks, 2nd June – 27th August 2020, 6.30 – 8.30pm
Sign up here
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