This weekend marked the first outing of the LARA roadshow.  We were invited by the British Museum to take the Atelier Experience to Islington’s Business Design Centre for La Dolce Vita – The Italian Festival in London.

For four days, 11th to 14th of March, the Atelier camped out at the central cross roads of this vast exhibition space, formerly the Royal Agricultural Hall, surrounded by some of best makers of ice cream and producers of olive oil on the planet.  During that time teachers and students of the Atelier were joined by large numbers of passers-by in drawing from the live model.

This was an unusual and – I suppose the word is ‘challenging’ event for all the artists involved, but most especially for our model, Ruta Zukaite, who not only had to contend with the usual problems faced by life models, draughts, fatigue, aches, pains and the complaints of the artists, but also with a variety of weird and whacky punters.  These included one guy, who shot about half an hour of video non-stop, three people who decided to poke her to see if she was real and an elderly gentleman who seemed to be a keener student of anatomy than many of our artists.  All of which, she bore with dignity and a warm sense of humour.

The artists included most of the Atelier’s teachers, James, Valentina and Giles were able to be there throughout, joined at various times by Gabriela Denny Segura. Luca Indraccolo was also present for all four days, accompanied by two of his fabulous charcoals.  Among the students present were Alex Heath, Sukhbir Purewal and Andrew Watson.

Drawing in such a public place turned out to be much less daunting than many of us imagined.  For one thing, any time you start drawing you tend to drop into the zone and whatever is going on around you seems much less important than the process of drawing itself. For another thing, the vast majority of people could not has been politer or more thoughtful.

As an added bonus, the weekend seemed to work very well in its own terms, as a marketing event.  We became, quite literally, the centrepiece of the show, representing in our own humble way, something that belongs to Italy as much as to the world: the Rennaissance, built on a love of the representational arts.  As suchn we brought a living presence to the British Museum’s featured trail for their upcoming, and hugely exciting Italian Renaissance Drawings (Fra Angelico to Leonardo).  Everyone at the Atelier is very proud to be associated with the Museum.  It would be fabulous to be working with them on other projects in the future.  And finally, everybody involved had an enormous amount of fun.