1. Berlin is awesome. I didn't know what to expect as the only other German city I've been in is Munich which is very clean, tidy and plays by the rules.... a lot of civic pride.
Berlin on the other hand truely is a city that welcomes rule breaking. The city is held together by graf, stickers and posters! And even though there is a smoking ban, nobody pays attention to it. We stayed in the Old Jewish Quarter where the gallery was and there was a brilliant creative/mad vibe to it all!The beer is damn good too.
There are some other piccys ... HERE.
2.Getting to work alongside Rockpool Candy, Jon Gibson, Jude Buffum and Love was a hoot. These guys have a crazy amount of energy and creativity, and the installation piece looked amazing. The overall design by Jude was a mad 8-bit pixelfest with each pixel represented on the wall by a post-it note (16,000 of which Jude brought with him from the States!).
Jude is going to put photographs of the final pieces on his site I think, I'll throw up a link to that HERE.
The second element to the piece (and the reason I was there) was to have drawings of characters on all of the pink post-it notes. I did mine in the gallery as we installed..
... Jon and Love had some that had been done in the states by crazies like Jim Mahfood and Scott Campbell.
...it all looked frickin' cool!
there's a load of installation photos...HERE.
3.
4. The Neurotitan Gallery and shop.
The gallery was cool and laid back and the staff were brilliant. The shop was my dream shop! They have uber cool tees and comics and brilliant indie magazines as well as selling merch from the gallery.
I spent more time than I should've browsing through comics by guys I'd never heard of before...like Manu Larcenet.
(copyright etc. of Manu Larcenet)
5. Putting up some tie-ups with Rockpool Candy.
The tie-ups were Rockpool Candys idea, our version of yarn bombing! I had some silk screen prints that I'd done on various materials, Rockpool put eye holes in them and came up with the brilliant idea of lacing them to objects like basques. I love this extension of the Mytarpit idea!!!
This was a giggle, because unlike stickers you can't just stick and leg it, you have to lace it around the tree (or whatever) tie it tight and secure a tag to it...about 2 minutes start to finish. So you just have to make it look like the most natural thing in the world, it's dress-a-tree-day!
(at this point I must apologise for my photos being out of focus...they aren't when I view them in iPhoto..hmm..).... gallery...HERE.
6. TARPITTING!!!
I live for setting my canvases free! And to set them free in such cool surroundings was awesome!
They were all given new homes, and plenty of people were kind enough to email me... Thank you all!
I've put a gallery...HERE.
7. The Pictoplasma conference.
First of all, I never thought I'd EVER be at a conference in a conference center that dealt solely with character design....Brilliant idea and a great place to see the nerds herding! I only went to one full day and it was good... but a wee bit stilted, a wee bit too "podiums and power point" for me. Meeting up with the speakers and other character design geniuses in the lobby bar was worth it though! The hands down star of the show was Gaston Caba. He is mad his characters are mad and he plays the guitar beautifully!
7. The Character walk.
How they got soo many galleries to participate is typical of the Berlin scene, I can't see it happening in the UK. It was a great way to see Berlin, and a great way for me to put up canvases. The awkward thing was that (a) only some galleries entered into the spirit of things... like The Private Panda Club
and the CHARACTERRORSCHACHKALEIDOSCOPE (an installation piece were the viewer created and moved a series of shapes on a big screen via one of those dance mats...very cool!). On the other hand you had galleries like the Merry Karnowsky Gallery who had pieces by Junko Mizuno and Miss Van, but it smacked off "look who we know!", it put the W in Wanky...waste of time, you can see thee pieces in books and you don't have to put up with that elitest collectable bullshit. The Private Pand Club brought the whole "character" idea to life. Everyone who put the panda head on automatically developed their own slutty slant on what was going on.
8. FIT (Fett In Trance)
This was a destination on the Character Walk which was playing host to Flying Fortress and London Police...But that's not why it was so cool. It was a tiny gas station that had been bought by an artist called Dida Zende and transformed into an art space, and this wasn't the first one he's done either.
He had such a welcoming and cool attitude.. and alright I lied it was pretty neat to be able to stand and watch Flying Fortress at work!...gallery ....HERE.
9. Rob Scholte. "Lucifer In Paradise"
We were out and about sticking up tarpitters when we came across a gallery that had the most astounding installation in it. This wasn't part of the Character Walk. It's just a pity that the gallery was closed because I need to know more about this guy. If anyone knows anymore about him please email me. I mean how mad is this...sorry I should say that the artworks below and the ones in the GALLERY are made up of matchbooks....frickin' genius!
10. New friends!
We met so many cool people, cool new friends.Thank you all for making it a fantastic time! Big thanks to Nele and Britta for showing us the real Berlin and getting me really pissed on half price Zombi cocktails! Also a big "HI to Gabe and Patti at KS12 who interrupted their filming of the conference to be generally cool! And StickerKitty for giving me a bag full of knocked off Chinese "OBEY" stickers!
