Drawinglive News

This was our second visit to DOX Gallery this year – this time it was to provide visuals on the roof terrace for an evening event held by Česká Pojišťovna to celebrate the company’s 185th anniversary. We set up three Tagtools – which meant that in addition to the two walls of the terrace we could also do some Tagtool drawing on the wall behind Martin Mikuláš‘s DJ console.I made the drawing in the photo above in order to ‘cover up’ Petr Motyčka‘s ‘Shoe Christ’, and just left this one image in place for the whole of the evening. This meant that we could concentrate on making a sequence of drawings using the other two Tagtools and it was great that Jan was able to come to draw with me as this meant that I didn’t have to work on two big drawings simultaneously all of the time! Below are two photos that I took of some of Jan’s work.As the temperature was much lower than it was in April on our previous visit to DOX, the patio heaters on the terrace were very welcome but because of the cold most people stayed in the bar and only went out onto the terrace to smoke.I began the evening by making the drawings below on the wall opposite the bar.And here are some more photos of drawings that I did later on in the evening….It would have been nice if the weather had been warmer – but the roof terrace at DOX is such a great place for Tagtooling that the cold wasn’t a problem for me!

The performance at Galerie Rudolfinum lasted for an hour but for this video Dima speeded it up so you can see the whole thing in only six minutes! The soundtrack for the video is taken from the live music by Hey!zeus and Radimo and was recorded at the event by Dima.

This week we gave a Tagtool performance as one of the Thursday evening events that have been arranged to accompany the current exhibition, ‘Beyond Reality, British Painting Today’, at the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague.As the photo above shows, the central hall of this important neo-renaissance building in Prague is elaborately decorated in various shades of cream, mushroom and brown, with all the columns and cornice picked out in blue and gold – a very grand and prestigious location indeed for Tagtooling!We used the gallery’s own powerful (and very expensive) Epson projectors for the performance, although as you can see in the photos above, mounting them on our tripods required some on-the-spot D.I.Y. adaptations by Dima. It was great to be able to use these big projectors as they gave a very bright image with beautiful strong colours – a clear case of expensive, high quality equipment producing the best possible result! From my position on the staircase landing I had a clear and unobstructed view of what I was drawing and with the two big Epson projectors it was possible for me to draw over the whole length of the upper part of the wall opposite.During the performance the audience sat or stood at the bottom of the stairs and, as they were hidden from my view while I was drawing, it was almost as if I was alone in the auditorium and the musicians, London-based Hey!zeus and Czech saxophonist Radimo, were playing just for me – which was really great!
Hey!zeus and Radimo were playing on the half landing of the stairway so that they too had an unobstructed view of the drawing in progress and I am sorry that I only have this very grainy photo of them to post on the blog.Although recently I have been using tracks from their LP for some practice drawing sessions at home, it was the first time that we had all worked together. The sound quality in the auditorium (provided by the company Vice Audio) was excellent and the live music was a really exciting and stimulating accompaniment for drawing.
I will end this post with a few photos and post Dima’s video of the performance tomorrow. (It’s uploading now as I write this!).

On Sunday there was to be another opportunity to see Maki and Itzi drawing with the Tagtool for iPad but the evening’s events began with a performance by Gerald Pfaffl. During the weekend in the centre of the main exhibition space he had constructed a large hollow sphere which he filled with concrete….. …and on Sunday evening when it had time to dry out….…he removed the lights, took up his pick and mallet….…and systematically reduced the ball to a heap of rubble, in the process bursting the bags of red paint ‘buried’ in the interior – a really spectacular performance!

Leaving Gerald’s heap of ‘bleeding’ rubble behind, the audience moved to the garage at mo.ë where Patryk Chwastek’s intricately decorated art car with his puppets made from found materials was installed.With the garage door open on to the street, Maki and Itzi took up their iPads and began to make a sequence of animated drawings using the windscreen of the car as their projection screen – a really fun idea that made a great end to the evening and the Kaleidoskop weekend!

On Friday we set up our ‘oldschool’ Tagtool in the small studio where the performance with K.U.N.T.Z. was to take place the following evening so that I had an opportunity to see how the projection would work in this setting. We left the projectors running on Friday night and I drew a few large black and white heads so that the room wasn’t in complete darkness during the exhibition…..The room was not large and it had a fairly low ceiling. But as most of the walls and the ceiling were painted white (and we covered the one area of exposed brickwork with some white boards), with all the ceiling lights switched off and the only available light coming from the projectors, this made it a really good location for Tagtooling. By working diagonally, with my Tagtool set in the corner opposite to the musicians, our two projectors covered the walls behind them almost from floor to ceiling. Here are some stills of the performance showing all the creatures represented in the songs – cat, frog, crow, donkey, fly, goat and wolf. These were taken from Dima’s video of the performance. I will post the video later when Dima has finished editing it, but meantime here is a ‘fun version’ of the event – it’s a low resolution “whirling dervishes’ eye view” that Dima made using a 360 ° lens positioned on the floor in front of the audience. The whole 40 minute performance is compressed into 3 minutes and the soundtrack is ‘Crow’, one of the 7 pieces in the song cycle.

For the second performance of the evening Matthias Widder provided the Tagtool accompaniment for Max and Luka’s improvised set. Below are some photos that I took of his drawing – Matthias created a fast moving, real ‘Kaleidoskop’ of vibrant colour which worked extremely well with the music.
In a couple of days I will do another posting covering the performances on Sunday 30 September, the last day of Kaleidoscop 2012.

This three day event at mo.ë was curated by Jan Linke (pictured left above, in front of a work by die. Puntigam. Jan’s paintings can be seen in the background of the two photos on the right and in the centre, ceramics by Gerald Pfaffl). The location of the exhibition was the main hall of mo.ë and each evening there were different artists’ performances in the adjoining studios.
Our oldschool Tagtool performance was scheduled for Saturday evening, so on Friday night when Maki and Itzi, with Ritsche on trumpet, were drawing using the (soon to be available!) new Tagtool for iPad I was able to join the audience, sit back and enjoy the show.As can be seen in the photo above, with the Tagtool for iPad it is even possible to draw while sitting comfortably in an armchair! Because it is so small and portable this new Tagtool app. makes multiplayer sessions easy to set up – and the animation features are really spectacular. I was so sorry that, as usual, I could only take still photos of Maki and Itzi’s performance….The dark green door and uneven surface of the studio wall added another dimension to the animation – and I was pleased to see that one of my favourite ‘characters’, the red pig, featured in the programme….I made the collage of photos below in the second half of the performance when Ritsche stepped out in front of the projection and became part of the ‘action’.I took lots of photos, but here is one shot from the ‘finale’ that I think captures well the atmosphere of what was a most engaging and enjoyable performance.Part 2 of Kaleidoscop 2012 – coming soon!

On Saturday 29 September at the Kaleidoskop 2012 weekend at mo.ë in Vienna there will be another opportunity to hear the song cycle ‘Animals’ by K.U.N.T.Z. that had its premiere on 13 September in Berlin at Bar Babette. Here are some of Dima’s photos of my visuals from a practice drawing session in our studio…..In our early rehearsals we worked all together in the studio – I drew while Jan and David played live. The drawings in the practice session above were made while listening to a sound recording – it’s not the same thing as working to live music of course, but very important as preparation for a public drawing performance.

Here is a video from the performance in Berlin of one of the songs. The circumstances for Tagtool drawing at Bar Babette were not ideal – there was a lot of ambient light and the position of my Tagtool on the balcony meant that I had a very oblique view of the stage, which made getting the drawing in the ‘correct’ proportion from the audience’s viewpoint very difficult. I think the music in the video is much more interesting than the drawing – but at least it gives some idea of the performance!

We arrived in Vienna on Saturday evening just in time to join Maki in a drawing session using the (soon to be released!) new Tagtool for iPad at the Buskers Festival. This two day event had attracted large crowds of people and many different street performers and musicians to Karlsplatz in the centre of the city.The photo above shows us sitting at the table with our iPads and, in the background, you can see the very neat solution devised by the crew for mounting the projector – it’s an upended folding pub bench with one leg acting as a shelf for the projector and the other secured to a rubbish bin!
It was great to have this opportunity to try out the Tagtool for iPad – and with Maki’s help I soon got to grips with all the various animation features – they’re great fun to use and have a completely different ‘feel’ to the oldschool Tagtool.Above is an iPad screenshot of the final image that Maki and I drew together and below is a photo I took with my little camera of the same image as it appeared (with interesting distortions) when projected onto the façade of the building.I’m so sorry that I didn’t take any video to show the animation – you will just have to imagine the boy nodding his head, bouncing up and down with his arms and tie waving, the tree gently swaying and the dog jumping……..

There are a lot of nice photos of Maki’s solo drawings on the first day this event on the Tagtool facebook page – do check them out!

We just got back from Berlin where our friend Ernst Altmann arranged for us to stage our first public performance of the new music and Tagtool work that we have been developing in the studio with our musician friends K.U.N.T.Z.Bar Babette on Karl-Marx Allee is a very nice venue but as always there was a lot of equipment needed for both music and visuals for the performance. It took Dima all day to get everything set up and working satisfactorily!The visual in the photo above, which accompanied the opening set by Berlin-based musician Axel, is a large scale projection of the mobile made by Ernst Altmann for this event. The mobile itself was installed at the opposite end of the bar with a spotlight trained on it in order to cast an ever-changing shadow on the white curtain behind.I took all these photos of Ernst’s work with my little camera but unfortunately they don’t really capture either the charm of the slowly revolving mobile and its accompanying shadow – or its grand presence when ‘translated’ as a projection on to the full height of the curtain behind the stage.

Dima took both photos and video of the song cycle by K.U.N.T.Z. that formed the centrepiece of the evening’s performances.For each of the seven creatures represented in the songs I made a separate Tagtool image, moving from one scenario to the next as the music progressed. This was a really challenging live drawing project for me – developing seven different drawings in 40 minutes of continuous drawing, and I usually draw people, not animals – but it was great fun to do! Here are a few of Dima’s photos – I will post the full video of the performance later.
The set of Rare/Primitive/Remixes by DJ Al Chem completed the evening’s entertainment and I did some more ‘freestyle’ Tagtool drawings which, because Bar Babette is essentially a glass cube with floor to ceiling white curtains, could be seen in reverse by people sitting at the tables outside as well as in the bar.

All this week K.U.N.T.Z. are recording in the studio so next week I should have lots of new material to post. But meantime – yesterday it was Jan’s birthday so after their recording session, Jan and David stopped work and made a big Austrian feast in the kitchen. We finished off the evening jamming in the studio with a crate of beer and an old-school Tagtool session…
And no, Jan does not have two heads – it’s just my bad photography! This time I really excelled myself by managing to take all the photos of my drawings out of focus – but I’ll finish off this post with two of the not so bad ones anyway…
We had a lot of fun, but now it is work, work, work for the rest of the week!