shelf life...

last friday a lovely bloke called rob fry delivered my office shelves.




i've not blogged much about our extension, because as i think i've said before, it's been a bit of a long, drawn-out and stressful process. but the arrival of the shelves have made a huge difference to everything as now i suddenly have places and spaces to store stuff. i'm not living and working out of boxes anymore. all my reference books are to hand. i'm rediscovering comicbooks that i'd forgotten i had. for the first time since we moved up here all my cds are out and visible in one place. in alphabetical order. [man, it feels good to be able to type that...]
suddenly spaces are opening up in every room in the house as my stuff is dragged out and stored in it's proper place at long long last...
it's a glorious thing.







the shelving units themselves are a bit mad, and i love them. big wheels on the three floor mounted ones so that we can move them out into the room to screen an area off if we have folk to stay here. they're the same wheels that they use on biffa bins, apparently. rob has done a fantastic job in making them. the end-grain on the shuttering ply that he's used is fantastic. wavy and organic and a bit all over the place. and they look a bit like they've been discovered and dragged out of an old warehouse, which is what i asked for. if you're up this way and you need a chippy, i'd happily recommend rob...

keeping busy...

[there are 30 of these robot storyboards on the desk at the mo. and a load of the smaller spot illustrations too. busybusybusy...]

greenbelt

apologies for the blog-silence - the week leading up to greenbelt, and the week since we got back have been way too hectic with workworkwork and various bits of back-to-school activity. plus i've been struggling to put into words exactly how i feel about the festival... especially when others like lawson and lobelia and lovely ian and gail are blogging very informatively about it elsewhere...

but, basically, it was great.
this year we ran a little self-portraiture project, inviting folks to come and spend a half-hour or so in the hub venue drawing themselves for a big wall of faces - effectively a self-portrait of the festival.
[pics courtesy of chris lawley]
we borrowed ten easels and drawing boards from the pittville campus up the road and expected to have maybe 25/30 punters through each day. in the end we got over 400 faces up there, with people queuing up to have a go from the moment we opened each morning...
we had a real mix of people through too - all ages and abilities, experienced draw-ers and folk who've not picked up a pencil since their schooldays - and it was really brilliant to work with them to produce stuff that in many cases they didn't believe they were capable of. from my point of view, it was a welcome contrast to the relative solitude of my working life, and a real joy to be teaching again - something i've not done for almost fifteen years now. those skills have lain dormant for a long time, and i'd forgotten how rewarding teaching can be [and that i was actually quite good at it]

the whole visual arts programme at the festival seemed to go very well this year - i loved leon varga's icarus bikes, phil hopkins' tables and martin wilson's beautifully obsessive photo projects... [you can find photos of them amongst the flickr pics here]
the artschool and the freebie 'art for all' prints were also really popular. so a big success all round.
in previous years, i've occasionally blighted our festival weekend by getting a bit knackered and stressed and losing my sense of persective at times, but this time i managed to get through the whole weekend with only a couple of misanthropic moments - one entirely justified when the occupants of a nearby tent decided to stay up all night laughing and carousing and generally choosing to ignore the fact that canvas isn't soundproof...

other great things about my greenbelt experience this year...
1. sitting out at night with the marts and the bennetts and beer and wine on the night before the festival started...
2. meeting old and seldom-seen friends - ian and gail, matt and family, various hardings, chris and angela from 'chaste', jon and claire b, paul cookson, the goans, simon emery and co, rory k, maybe-ers, the hills, jonesy, lloydy and keren, harv, the lawsons, lovely dave walker, mark lou nathan and the telford folk etc etc etc...
3. taking eddie to see 'fightstar' [who i enjoyed quite a bit more than i'm willing to admit to] and the mosh-fest that was 'rising from death' [we stood at the side out of harm's way... eddie went up and spoke with them afterwards - he asked the bassist where he got his "cool cape" from - and they were really lovely with him]
4. pizza with many chillis on it.
5. the beer tent, and beer vouchers to spend within it...
6. joe dancing for the entertainment of passers-by in the 'arkadash' tent with a glow stick and a pair of 'pants to poverty' y-fronts on his head...
7. cookson, ian mcmillan and stewart henderson
8. a shower
9. the 'pie minister' stand and food vouchers to spend there...
10. iain archer doing a couple of solo tunes in the hub one lunchtime
11. meeting new folk [inc sally thompson who i'd only previously met online via the parable comic forums]

things that i missed that i'd like to have seen/done...
1. too much music to mention - but especially the aforementioned lawson and lobelia, miriam jones, spearhead, emmanuel jal, seth lakeman, howe gelb/giant sand, anna elais and the forlorn hope, brute chorus etc etc etc
2. comedy. especially jo enright
3. david dark [i'm cross about that - he was the one speaker that i really wanted to hear this year]
4. printmaking in the art school
5. the artists' forums
6. gav's impromptu gig
7. rev gerald ambulance
8. ikon, maybe and all the stuff that went off in the new forms venue - i never even made it up there once this year...

some bad stuff happened too - joe lost his rag once or twice, and got some money stolen when he left his purse in a portaloo. and i had a falafel disaster - five huge chunks of celery hidden within the pitta. evil.

but overall it was a great weekend, and as ever, it's been a bit of a come-down returning home and getting back into 'normal' life again... maybe, as steve ponders here, the trick is to try and take something of the festival on into our everyday existence and not leave it behind in cheltenham...