27th April 2013 was a momentous day in our little seaside town's history. I grew up here, moved away, travelled the world and moved back. When I moved back i moved back with my beautiful wife Inga, and we quickly realised that there were loads of creative people living in Bangor, but they didn't seem to know that each other existed. So we set up a loose collective of local artists callled 'Firsty", and Firsty grew and grew in membership (there are now 400+ members), we put on pop-up art shows and started to really change the cultural landscape of our little sleepy town. Then about a year ago Inga and Leon Smith put there collective geniuses together along with the good folks at North Down Borough Council and came up Project 24. This would be an incubation space with 12 artists pods over 2 years (24), the artists would have a unique chance to work and interact with the public...but more importantly (in my opinion) for 2 years the centre of our town would be art. Art would become an everyday occurrence and part of the local vocabulary.. how exciting is that!! (There are loads more details on Project 24 if you google it, I won't go into the minutia here). I'm so proud of Inga for dedicating a year of her life to this (and handling all the flack she got from various quarters...you know who you are and should be ashamed of yourselves!), and I'm so chuffed that through everyone's efforts on Saturday it had it's official opening in the glorious sunshine!
I was asked to contribute by taking part in a livepaint with 3 of the best - DMC, VisualWaste, and Chris Cunningham. It was a great 3 hours, great to be painting again, great to see how much interest the public had in what we were doing.....
This was the sketch I came up with on my iPad a couple of hours before the paint.
DMC getting started
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VisualWaste is to my right and Chris is to his right
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not bad for 3 hours graf(t)...
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Bangor just got itself one top class amazing wall. Brilliant day. Totes Emote!
