At Colours of Ostrava Festival

This year I was drawing with the Lunchmeat Label, who were providing visuals for performers on the Electronic Stage, a new festival stage in the renovated Old Baths Building of the Hlubina Mine in the historic Dolni Vitkovice complex.My set was to accompany Sons of Magdalene, a project of American musician Joshua Eustis. I began with some rather dark-toned monochrome drawing.The Lunchmeat crew had this big screen set up behind the stage with mesh ‘wings’ on either side which meant that two ghostly versions of my images appeared on either side of the stage when I was drawing. I began with a lot of transparent ‘clouds’ which Dima then animated, enabling me to have a moving and continuously changing background over which to develop my drawing. Using animation like this with the ‘old-school’ Tagtool is something new for us in a performance – and although it was often difficult for me to draw against this moving background it looked very effective. I don’t have any video so the photos (kindly taken for us by Gome) will have to serve to give some idea of this process.



Then I began to use colour, again over an animated background and this time Dima also applied animation to the figure, making dramatic changes in scale.


We followed this with a more abstract animation with lots of fast moving lines….
…then I ‘covered’ this animation with some more figurative drawing.

To end this post – a shot from the final moments of the performance.