Lockdown Five (a continuing, if erratic, saga)

A bit of a mixed couple of weeks (12 days as I’m writing) doing a variety of different things.

Lots of gardening, lots of preparation for a series of small sculptures – nothing to show there yet – drawing, painting and so on.

Looking through Instagram, which I just rejoined, I came across #draweverydayinmay2020 run by ‘Marigold the Maker’ under the auspices of The Big Draw. Part of it is to use the additional hashtag #stillpointsketchingchallenge and place some creative limitations on your daily sketching. I decided to use Autodesk Sketchbook to produce all the drawings on my iPad, work between 9:00 am and 10:00 am each day and remain in my seat at the kitchen table.

painting of lemons

Teaching myself to paint

I also bought myself some boards, 5mm ply 25 cm square, to do some small paintings, just to keep my hand in. These lemons were started the same day I drew the two in the dish in the gallery.

I also applied for the Yorkshire Sculpture International Network 2020, which is a set of online meetings fortnightly from June until October where Each of the participating artists will be invited to contribute to developing the content of the network’s programme and to the research and development for the next Yorkshire Sculpture International festival. This programme will enable us to ensure we are building the future artists’ professional development in the most useful way for artists.” I should find out if I’m successful next week, I can’t imagine there will be many people my age applying.

ArtBomb Video  

Flickr Video

Art Bomb Video

I’m posting this again to remind myself, the arts group I did this with has done a zoom meeting with all the videos played, I wasn’t invited (or I missed the email?) I know it’s not great but it would have been nice to be asked.

Lockdown Continued… (notice the calmer Title Case)

The VR world from the geranium project on simmer – www.simmer.io/@IanLatham/the-geranium-project – takes 8 minutes and 7 seconds to load.

The latest WebGL build on my own website – www.ian-latham.com/geranium/build – takes 11 minutes and 39 seconds to load.

I’ve spent hours trying to work out how to make the things load more quickly but everything I try seems to make little or no difference.

I participated in an online event for the Doncaster New Fringe art group, a kind of delayed open studio evening in which artists film their work and upload the videos to a website. This is the video I made Art Bomb Video for Doncaster New Fringe I found some old 3d models I made for sculptures over a number of years and built a VR environment for them, I then made an awful video of my studio and me explaining what I’d done in fluent gibberish and placed that video inside the VR world. I recorded that through the computer and there you go.

Other than that this week has been a lot of gardening, building a greenhouse, and the endless frustration of Unity!

greenhouse

My New Greenhouse

I finally got the WebGL build down to 6 minutes and 17 seconds! Or at least below 7 minutes over several tries, the load bar doesn’t work properly though.

Studio Strike (Two weeks to leave)

Upstairs Studio Cleared

Upstairs Studio Cleared

The upstairs of the shop is now cleaner and emptier than when I moved in.

I’ll be leaving my studio next Wednesday, no prospect of a new one yet, everywhere is shutting up shop, and I’m hopeful my van driver will honour the contract. We live in interesting times.

Shop ready to empty

Shop ready to empty

So all of this is now here…

Stacked Garage

Stacked Garage

Apart from the bits that are here…

Attic Studio

Attic Studio

Ready to work in isolation!

For the sake of future reference ACE effectively canceled all the National Lottery Project Funding currently pending in order to create a support system for freelancers who are seriously compromised by the current closure of everywhere. So all my plans are on hold along with everyone else’s. What I’ve decided to work on now is a Web GL version of the VR world and see what I can do to finesse it.