Working Across the Continents..

Last weekend has been truly rewarding as well as inspiring.

Saturday – I spent the day with a group of young artists and designers – delivering a course on communication and presentation skills. We’ve been talking about setting up something like this for a very long time – and then life happened. Everything slowed down and the entire 2011 – went by the way side.   I’m glad to be back in my element and am now working on building a partnership project with IlangoArtspace, Chennai in India.

The training session went really well. The participating young people were thoroughly engaged and I was deeply moved by their openness to learning.  The best session was in the afternoon when they had to work on their own presentations and the range of styles that came out as a result was simply mind blowing. I would love to create this magic again..

Sunday – I was invited to give a talk at Spaces, Chennai on ‘Artists and Leadership’. This was part of an arts market organised by Prakrit Art Gallery. Again, I was amazed at the quality of work that was presented there. Lot of sales… it was really heartening to see the direct contact between the buyer and the artists.  My talk was part of the artists support organised by the trade fair organisers. Initially it seemed like a difficult concept to get to grips with but a short summary with lots of personal anecdotes got the juices flowing and the questions were put forward. There was also the language problem, some of them didn’t understand English.  But quickly that disappeared too. From what looked like a formal session, it turned out to be a very inspiring afternoon for all of us. Prakrit Art Gallery and Meena Dadha have done a great job in putting this fair together.  Artists from all corners of India came to showcase their work. The plenary was about how the artists should look at other areas to strengthen their personal development – such as presentation skills, marketing and publicity etc.

More initiatives like this are needed to put Chennai on the art scene along with Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai and to stop the talent drain that it often suffers with.