Busy weekend!

So, right off, there was the Bristol Sketchers meeting.  The focus should've been the italian motors in and around Corn Street, but it was too crowded for my liking and I took shelter in St. Nick's Market.  I ate an early lunch and did an awful colour sketch of the woman behind the counter of Royce Rolls - doesn't look much like her, she moved around too much.

Then I wandered about the market (bought a 2nd-hand easy-piano album of songs from Cabaret, the Judy Dench stage version) and made my way back to Neptune's statue, the meeting place for the group, by 1pm.  While we waited for everyone to return, I sketched the building that houses a co-op supermarket in St. Augustine's Parade.

We reconvened to a Corn Street café to look at our output and chat.  By the time we'd all had a go to 'show and tell' it was time to sprint up to the RWA for the private viewing of work by Robert Lenkiewicz.

This was really something, as I'd only discovered this artist last September, when I passed a bookshop window in Fowey.  It displayed several books reproducing his artwork and I was immediately struck by the guy's versatility of style and use of colour.  I brought one of the books back to Bristol with me, never thinking that I'd get the chance to see his paintings up close.

So, RWA set up five rooms to display a great wealth of his works, some of which are on enormous canvasses.  Exhilarating stuff.  What wasn't so great was the inclusion of the embalmed corpse of one of his muses - the homeless man known as 'Diogenes'.  I'm not very good with seeing dead, um... things. :(

Still, a great exhibition - a tremendous coup for RWA.  I'm going to revisit it a great many times before the end of its run.

Now, today - we had really good weather again and I was considering leaving Bristol to find something in the country to sketch.  Instead, I left the car behind, put on my trainers and followed the sunshine to The Temple, or Holy Church in Temple Street.

Its tower has been subsiding since its construction in 1460 and the church itself has been derelict since incendiary bombs gutted it in 1942.  Walking around its perimeter is scary.  I was reminded of the novel Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd...

I moved swiftly into the sun in the adjoining Temple Gardens, where I did a sketch of one of the windows as well as a quick colour sketch of a family un-self-consciously picnicking on a tomb :S

I moved on, meandering towards the harbour and ended up taking in the Cosima Von Bonin's exhibition of soft sculptures and macabre playgrounds at the Arnolfini.  I liked the use of stitched line-drawings and  phrases on blanket material.  Not sure about the neon cigarette motif that was repeated often.  Anyone got any ideas on that?

After an early supper at Watershed (where I bought my Friday tix for Wim Wenders 3D movie Pina) I headed to St. George's for a half marathon performance of Vexations by Erik Satie.  It was (on the whole) a relaxing and hypnotic experience, the short sequence of music played in bundles of 30 by a stream of pianists to a total of 420 repeats.  The relative stillness of the performers enabled me to get some more sketching practice in :)

All in all, a rewarding weekend :)