Boring Meeting? Not When You're Sketching!

As part of being Artist-in-Residence, I have more than once asked of I want to attend a meeting, some of them lasting an entire day. 

I don't know about you, but in my world, that's not normally something you would volunteer for, not when you don't need to. It's a very different story though, when you're there to create a visual record.

I have really enjoyed the challenge of trying to capture every speaker, with a little of what they were trying to get across:

If it's a full-day event, I set myself the additional target of filling an entire book before the end. This was a day-long meeting about Research Bids. I was very pleased with myself indeed, for getting it to fit perfectly on one concertina: 

Actually, I am finding the meetings themselves quite interesting. They are surprisingly varied. My difficulty is that, because I am deep in academia, a lot of the phrasing and terminology people use is hard to retain for long enough to get it written down. I think to myself 'That's a good sound-bite' and start to weave words around the images but then, 4 words in, the end of the sentence is already dissolving away! 

I've more and more been using paint to 'draw' with, or to splosh in as a coloured foundation, before I use a pencil or ink to refine things. It's so fast and so much easier if my subject is moving.

One of the other things that I enjoy about these meetings is that, although the Morgan Centre team are quite familiar now with what I'm up to, the wider community of the School of Sociology has a much vaguer idea, since many of them haven't seem me in action before. So, it's really good fun to scribble away in a corner all day then, at the end of a meeting, just before everyone leaves, to open my sketchbook out along a table, then watch people's faces. 

It's a sort of a ta-da! moment. To be honest, I love all the attention :-D

By the way: remember the sketchbook that I mounted on the wall in the studio a while ago out, as a test? Well, it was still up there, so I carefully slid it out of its little hooks and popped this new one in, just for fun:

It was surprisingly easy to do, which is very handy. I am so pleased with how they look when you mount them.