So, last Sunday, we opened up our Studio PuRRR for the public, who came to the Kadefestival Delfshaven (a local festival in the Rotterdam area Tussendijken), right at our very doorstep at the Spangesekade and organised by our partner Schiezicht. My creative partner Deborah van de Beld and I'd decided to put together a small showcase of our creative skills, resulting in some Witty Art on the walls and a bit of Deborah's handmade costumework on display.
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For this occasion, I opted for a small presentation of a series still pretty much in progress: ''TEST L.A.B. (Lost Accidental Babies)'', a series featuring one of the most popular characters in Witty Art: UnBunny. This time, UnBunny finds himself captive in what appears to be a test lab facility where UnBunnies like himself are subjected to a series of sinister experiments, resulting in them losing shape and form and ultimately their mind.
A gruesome fate, you wouldn't want to wish upon anyone, however, as we catch glimpes of life outside, the question comes to mind whether life in the madhouse is to be prefered above the real world gone even madder. Also, if you have lost your mind, who says you cannot be happy regardless? Does one really need a sane mind to be really truly and fully happy in this world?
To be fair, questions like these pop up in my mind quite often...
I showed this series, which I originally started in 2012 and is very much up and running in 2017, before at a Pop Up Expo in the beginning of 2015, but for this occasion I thought it'd be nice to show some of the drawings still in progress. As to give the viewers a bit of an impression how Witty Art is created, in this case from the initial first pencil sketches to adding the lines in ink and adding the layers of watercolouring.
Consider it a bit of ''The Making of Witty Art'', so to speak.
Directly facing those poor little TEST UnBunnies, on the opposite wall, you can see a small selection of four so-called Singles, all of them created back in 2013-2014. These have been on display on several locations before, amongst others at Route du Nord (edition 2014) and at private artgallery Lijnbaan140 (2016) and I felt that their minimalistic mood would contradict with the colourful explosive force of the TEST L.A.B.-series in an interesting way.
After all, both type(s) of work reflect the World of Witty Art, albeit in different manners, but they definitely are firmly rooted in common ground.
During the day, quite a number of interested people came into our studio and had a look at our presentation, which led to often very entertaining and interesting conversations about our work and our studio.
So this was a very good 'test run' as far as opening up our studio is concerned, a thing we definitely are willing and planning to do more often, by organising exhibitions and other creative and culinairy events, such as our pop up restaurant Tante Timmie Kookt (Tante Timmie's Kitchen) and more!
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