Flirting with the Arts–Sunday success

Artist Meg Leslie cooked up, from scratch, an awesome event she called Flirting with the Arts, in which the attendees picked 6 half-hour timeslots from 12 creative workshops led by artists/writers/musicians/etc.  The whole thing went off swimmingly on Sunday and I dropped by to have a look, chat with some friends, and take an unreasonable number of photos…

Here’s Meg.  She reached out to me share the word a bit on the event, and I was happy to help, seeing solid players involved like James Nye and Agnes Niewiadomski.  Happily all 60 tickets sold out.  I’ve got a major soft-spot for invented creative happenings (see Hilary Abel, Steel Rails; Cathy Farwell, BOX Art; Alternatives\Journal, Night\Shift).  Getting my 5+5 events off the ground back in the kwartzlab days showed me how much damned work these gigs are, how much people like them, and how critical it is to support these fragile new blocks in the the creative ecosystem.  A few bullet points before TL;DR threshold:

• 60 tickets sold at $75/ea with 10% going to House of Friendship
• instructors get paid, yo!  Respect.
• 12 instructors, split evenly gender-wise, across a variety of disciplines.  Win!
• audience was almost exclusively women
• shout-out to the 10’ish who drove in from Orillia(!) from whence Meg hails originally

Here’s artist Kathryn Kaiser-Hiron…

teaching…

portraiture.

Blame it on winter, but this whole post, my friends, gets bumped colour saturation.

Everywhere I go, there is…

Mr. James Nye…

bringing painting…

to the people.  To do so in a half-hour timeslot…

you gotta prep the canvases the night before.

Xavier Fernandes was teaching…

lino-cut printmaking.  How cool does this look?  I was ready to drop the camera and pull up a chair here.

Printmaker Xavier Fernandes.

Potatoes from attendees, destined for House of Friendship. Of course, me being highly-suggestible, I made potatoes for dinner.

Maya Polywjanyj helping peeps develop their own symbol.

Maya Polywjanyj

This horn controlled everything.  Honk => move to next workshop.  If you’re holding the horn, you get to speak—no, wait—wrong story.

Patti Agapi (left) driving some collage-making.

Yes.

My old friend, Agnes Niewiadomski (smiling), circling up a felting crew.  Agnes has a sixth sense for when to look up and smile for a photo.  No ambushing her.

 

Playwright Gary Kirkham was so awesomely animated with his groups that I just wanted to linger and see what happened as they scripted a 20-second scene.  For his bill of materials, all Gary asked for was some dough to pay a videographer who shot the scenes that were created.  Can’t wait to see those vids.

The flux capacitor.

Chandler (that’s a candle maker, y’all) Carol Kubassek behind the bar.

Dwight Storring.

Oh yeah!  Forgot to mention: Meg is the current artist-in-residence at kwartzlab.  Big tile project in progress, I hear.

Ryan Consell, to whom I feel indebted as he had to endure my Project Loud Monkey booth, adjacent to his, at Waterloo Maker Faire back in June last year.  This year, Ryan, I’m only considering very quiet submissions for the Faire.

Speaking of kwartzlab, Ryan is a member, having done a stint as artist-in-residence there.  His work, shown here, is killer.

Brought his own table, he did.

This hammering makes…

this sort of cool stuff.

Tool fetish on my part + self-portrait.

Food looks awesome here.  Alas… photography > food for me.

Guitarist John Shymko, in from Burlington, was speed-teaching intro slide guitar.

He came with a whole rack of guitars, which is sort of analogous to my grab-bag of cameras.

He gets major maker-points from me for…

repurposing copper t-joints from the hardware store as…

a $2.50 guitar slide.  Bravo.

This resonator guitar is gorgeous.

This was a great venue for the event.  Definitely coming back.

Near-meta here.  This fellow photog from snapdKW.  These guys hit almost *every* event going.  Hats off to you.

Janice Lee (centre), teaching spoken word…

then there was dancing.

Maryanne Paul, teaching writing.

Had to hit the street.  Big high-five to Meg Leslie and this cool group of creative ninjas for putting this together.  This is what it’s all about.  WR, when you see these type of gigs: sign up and then show up.  Guaranteed to make you happier.

DW