A point of view from the otherside

I gave a demo to an art club I had visited 15 years earlier. I couldn’t remember the topic or medium I had used and didn’t tell them about my earlier demo until the end. Fifteen years is a long time, but some members remembered me. I was only made aware of this after I boasted about my claim to fame—using unusual media such as oil pastels and shoe polish on rag paper—and my love of drawing and painting jazz bands. No guesses what I demonstrated to them 15 years before this event. I definitely need to find some new stories to tell. I was quite nervous about the medium I had been asked to demonstrate: coloured pencils. Drawing and essentially colouring in for two hours could be quite boring. To make the demo interesting and engaging, I would have to be rather creative! The topic was to draw an African scene. Coming from Africa, this topic was right up my street. I chose donkeys pulling a makeshift form of transport, the back half of a Toyota car. The first half of the demo, before the tea break, was chatty and ‘fun’; I told many stories of my experiences teaching art in Africa. The donkeys looked great, and I managed to impress by not using an eraser to shorten the donkeys' exaggerated long legs, instead using intense shadows to mask the extra bits. After the break, most artists see it as a race to finish the painting or drawing into a presentable piece of art. My donkeys are now pretty much finished; the fellow on top, driving them with a big grin, is done too. The drawing looks okay, but it only shows two donkeys and a man sitting on top of the trailer, which is very uninteresting. With ten minutes left, I admit I smiled to myself as my creative side came into play. I started to draw all the people making their way to market in quick, sharp strokes, with some colouring in; African women with their headdresses, a baby on the back, a wheelbarrow full of pineapples. This is where I believe I had the most fun, and the crowd loved it.