Soul 2 Meeting of Style
8 years after my first visit to the international Meeting of
Style event in Wiesbaden, I applied for a wall. I joined a group of artists, expressing abstract, letterstyles and characters.
Before actually coming to Germany we had conversation going about concepts and colourschemes and one of the first surprises was to see my name (yo!) on pre-event piece, and i was excited.
We met up, 2 swedish artists, an belarussian and an american and started to map out the wall. We got 3 extra artists on the wall, mixing in mexican storytelling, and a beautiful mix of characters and abstract.
Covering the wall and then run out of the base colour demanded agility and flexibility, but being in the flow meant collaboration and co-creation and adaptation.
The theme of the event was ”critical mass”, based upon a
qoute:
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
and the words, which resonated within me was the concept of ”soul 2 soul”. A connection, a kinship – with strangers who become friends.
I dont do any sketch but a guide to the letters or ideas, and I felt that the work of SBAH really fitted so good with my #letterscapes, so the first lines and basic shapes was down.
I have previously used background colour within the piece, blurring the line between background and foreground, so I made some of the letters with brushes, adding spray – leaving some spots which was perfect in that state, and then left untouched for rest of the weekend.
Getting the S down, several S´s down, doing shapes of an O, adding a 2 at the end, was my intention to read it forwward and backwards (soul 2 soul, or soul z)
It was a superchilled and extremely fun-giving event, meeting other artists, seeing the collective mass of talent and exchange experiences in a global community.
I almost have more ”painters clothes” than normal clothes, and even more pair of shoes…the combination of 30 degrees painting, strenonous, dedicated, determined work caused the shoes and actual soles to split, so I became the silvershoe madman and even got my shoes tagged.
One part of the wall was a climbers area, so one of the artist Ollio applied his ornamentic approach and I could see this application on a wider, commercial scale.
Once the paint was dry, climbers jumped to the wall to test the new routes.
Learnings was for me, yet to speed up the painting process, but feels that I having more clarity on the direction the method to be a voice – and the good vibes co-creating without language, and making the wall expressive and full of stories to be found and shared
