More Art And Things

On Thursday morning I'd been invited to talk about my art and music at the ACM research conference at the RSA in Charing Cross. It was interesting to go to an academic event after such a long time. There were some interesting papers and I enjoyed meeting Ngaire Ruth after being an online friend for a while. She adeptly foresaw that someone might try to derail her paper by asking an irrelevant question afterwards and had a slide prepared to circumvent him. Classy!

Later on I made a two hour pilgrimage to Brockley to see Darren Hayman's night paintings at the Artdog Gallery. Darren started up the Sunday Drawing Club and there were actually four of us there at the opening IRL- but only three at the same time: Sophie came along later. The gallery is small (nice to see Pete Astor, John Jervis and other friends, albeit briefly) so after a look at the paintings, small and very effective paintings on board that you may have seen in The Observer last week, we repaired to a local beer garden to yak. Here's a photo of me, Darren Riley and Darren Hayman, and a rather wonky one of Darren's paintings, which are really disconcerting in a good way when seen en masse. Painting noir, I suppose!

It took another two hours to get home on a slow bus which took an interesting tour through newly gentrified south London, just as imprisoning in its shiny new brick as it had been with the tatty old bricks. I often feel that it will grab me in its concrete tentacles and pull me back into the past. Urgh- scary!