Studio PuRRR opened up for the first time for Kadefestival 2017 - including small showcase of Witty Art!

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.

As this is my Witty Art Blog, I will focus on my own presentation here, but you if want to follow both our individual and combined creative and culinary projects, please follow Studio PuRRR on both Facebook, Instagram and ofcourse, our brandnew Blog.

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!

As said above, if you don't want to miss out on upcoming Studio PuRRR events, please follow us on Facebook and/or Instagram.

Preparing for a small showcase of Witty Art during Kadefestival Delfshaven!

Currently, I am busy preparing a small showcase of Witty Art for the upcoming Open Day at our own creative studio Studio PuRRR. We were given the opportunity of opening up our studio as part of the programma of Kadefestival Delfshaven (an initiave by our partner Schiezicht), this coming Sunday August 27th! So, both my creative partner The House of Westenwind (costume designer and professional cook) and I are currently getting our studio ready for showcasing a (small) selection of our work and our creative skills and hopefully, that day some people will pay a visit to our space at the Spangesekade,which is also the very location of the festival. 

Do you happen to be around Rotterdam coming Sunday? You are more than welcome, admission to the festival is free of charge and there is lots of other great stuff to see, including a small artist market, lots of musical and theatre performances, creative workshops and lots of tasty food, all of this made and catered to you by local makers from Delfshaven!

A new studio for both Witty Art & Witty Projects (and much more): Studio PuRRR

So, I've been a bit behind on updating this Witty Art Blog - but for a good reason! The last couple of weeks have been insanely busy with preparing the move to my new workplace at Studio PuRRR, the creative artstudio I set up last year, together with my creative partner and fellow artist Deborah van de Beld. For a while, Studio PuRRR was a travelling pop up initiative, trying out some small-scale creative and culinary concepts on various locations - but pretty soon we found a more permanent place for ourselves.

We have moved into Schiezicht, a local, Delfshaven based community initiative, founded and ran by a group of dedicated locals who share the same views on grass roots community and place making, creative and social entrepreneurship, local economy and sustainability. It was there, when looking for a venue to host our production Horen Zien en Schranzen (an art and literature event featuring Dutch poets and singer-songwriters) that we stumbled across this really great space with the full potential of turning it into the ideal artstudio and the perfect homebase for both our creative companies and artist practices, as well as all other individual and combined projects: Studio PuRRR.

And as our luck would have it, the Schiezicht crew were looking for some new faces to join their team as well. So, after a couple of talks, we reached an agreement and we got the keys to what's now our very own studio!

Now, an important part of this agreement with Schiezicht is that both Deborah and I are both part of Schiezicht's core crew, helping this initiative grow and develop further. I do so by taking care of external communications (digital newsletter, website, and so on) and Deborah is part of the cooking team, which serves tasty homemade meals to the neighborhood at a friendly price. This fits seamlessly with our own vision on creative and social entrepreneurship, creating additional social value for the community.

Schiezicht means so much as ''view on the river Schie'', very apptly named as it's located directly on the riverside of the 'Delfshavense Schie' in an area of Rotterdam called Delfshaven - to be precise, on the outer fringe of a neighborhood called Bospolder Tussendijken. Perhaps not the most glamorous part of booming Rotterdam (hot, hip and happening on all kinds of To Be Lists and in the middle of the grip of gentrification) with high unemployment rates and many vulnerable people living in the margins of society. But to us, it's one of the most interesting because of its combination of a cultural diversity, social resilience and creativity, outer edginess and hidden gems of local entrepreneurship, artists and makerspaces. 

And sure enough, we aren't the only ones, as Bospolder Tussendijken managed to grasp the attention of The Duchess of Cambridge, Catherine Middleton, who visited the area and it's local makerspace Bouwkeet in person only very recently. Read an impression of her visit both here and here. Unfortunately for us, we were still busy renovating our own artists space then, but rest assured, we are more than ready for her next visit!

Either way, I for myself am extremely happy for the opportunity to be working in this new studio, which, in more than one way, proves to be the perfect venue for not only creating Witty Art and developing myself further artistically but to roll out further Witty Projects, in a way that suit me - because I firmly belief in the concept of commercidealism: the ability to run a succesful business and a profitable company, that will enable me to sustain myself as well as generating some form of social return. What exactly, I am right in the middle of finding that out - as I am still rebuilding my life and my business, after having lost my house and my home about almost two years ago. A process, I've been trying to visualise in my Witty Art Book ''My Life In Limbo'' (which I am behind updating too, will do so SOON!)

It's still a long way to go. It's still a steep hill to climb. 
But I no longer feel it's a whole mountain. 
And I've found, that going downhill no longer means hitting rock bottom.
I've found that rock bottom isn't that scary after all, too.

And I am determind to make this work.
Because I no longer simply believe I have a lot to offer to society.
I know I do. 
And this time, I will do so in the way that is right for both society and me.