| 23 July 2010
Dynamic Drawing in Melbourne originated in Byron Bay (calling Byron home for the past decade) has now been working with Melbourne as its base for the last eighteen months.
The year 2009 culminated with a retrospective exhibition at the end of the year with 60 exhibitors selected from the classes and over 200 works on display at the gallery and a massive roll-up on the opening night. This brought a new wave of people to the classes and numbers exploded to where now it is the biggest drawing class in Melbourne.
It was a real struggle when we first got here to find a venue and get any publicity or media support. A rude shock indeed after all the community and media support that the Dynamic Drawing classes received in Byron.
After a few shaky starts in other places, we finally discovered Fitzroy and knew pretty much straight away it was right... with all the graffiti on the walls and all the hip cafes, studios/ bookshops etc... there was already a great dialogue happening here, and there was a switched-on demographic, like a river to swim in.
Melbourne?... is just so layered, you just keep discovering more (it took about 6 months just to believe what I was looking at... like whether it was science fiction or was it real!?)... it has a density and an intensity but, unlike other places, its history and its culture is still visible, not everything has been torn down. There are still lots of beautiful old buildings.
You can read the stories on old walls and there are lots of amazing deserted factories........it’s a kind of mysterious literature, like there are piss back alleys where ghosts come walking out of bluestone walls. And in winter the wind howls like a choir on the rooftops and the chimneys on B street lean down like tombstones........a really kind of gothic thing, you get to understand where Nick Cave and Doc Martins and all that kind of thing fits in........in a way, like being on another planet.......completely different energies.
But the narratives and meditations people reveal and the energies they engage in are kind of the same the world over... that kind of intimacy and poesy, that summons ‘language’, that is striking and ever-expanding. To tap into that kind of stuff and see people hit off those kind of baselines is sustaining and finally enchanting.The grass roots response to the classes has been fantastic, on-going and widespread, people from all over with all different backgrounds turning
up to draw. In cultures where people are increasingly being controlled and manoeuvred.......... pushed aside, set up or compressed into ritual... there remains a primary and fundamental need for self-expression, self-recognition, a measure of intimacy... free expression is the housing for sanity.
While in many different ways Melbourne has been a great success, it’s still essentially another big city with all the drawbacks and even downers that a city can bring (crazy traffic, concrete, pollution, street crime etc.) but doing the classes has been kind of a mission, like waving the flag for free or pure drawing... and developing a dynamic drawing base down here that I can work from and return to when I need.
So the north coast will be so great to get back to... the church of the open sky, the sunshine and the ocean, the mountains and the song of the waves and that vibrant, diverse, crazy, never-ending community of people that is Byron!!
'Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.’ Eckhart Tolle
