The Leytonstone Arts Trail 2026 PV of my show and workshop took place yesterday evening at The Castle Play Space at 8pm.
Throughout the week I was worried about:
- inviting too many people and simultaneously worried about not enough people coming to pay for the model/dancer
- hanging my drawings on command strips and having all of them fall down
- having to hang all the fridge door paintings and that same evening having to take them down and back to the studio
- not being able to convey my message due to being so stressed out to be speaking to a group of people
The mistakes I made:
- some of the works did fall down because I used wrong command strips and had to glue the frame and reattach it to the wall
- I didn’t leave enought time to prepare for the workshop: buy paper, write what I was going to say, decide how I am going to interact with people while leading the workshop
- I initially got an ok from the space owner to drill into the wall and hang but she changed her mind last minute and I had to rework the concept from hanging on the wall to something else
- I didn’t pack up the works properly so while I was driving “The Crone” painting fell onto “The Maiden” scraping off some paint in the process, which made me feel very sad and frustrated, not the best mood to start the workshop
How I would fix them:
- plan ahead and prioritise (maybe showing the paintings for 1-2h was not the best idea, I could have focused on the workshop more if I didn’t do that, it took a lot of energy, looked nice, but a bit unneccessary)
- protect all paintings before packing them, use at least styrofoam boards to put in between
- write down what I was going to be saying or give a little bit more structure to the workshop and buy all the supplies way ahead of time even if I don’t know how many people are coming
That said…
- 7 people bought ticket on Eventbrite
- 2 more people joined and paid in preson
- with a total of 9 people I could easily pay the dancer
- the 3 people who were not artists seemed the most relaxed and really enjoyed the experience, which was my main goal. Contrary to what I expected, the artists seemed to be more stressed about getting the figure right whereas the non-artists just enjoyed themselves, that made me really happy, it proved that non-artists benefit from doing art just like they would from doing meditation or exercising, it was relaxing and fun for them. Here’s a quote from one of the people sent to me after the workshop: “Hi Olga 👋 just wanted to say thank you again for your event last night. I really valued the time to enjoy the sensory side of drawing – the movement, the colours, the sound – would definitely join another one! 🌈💗”
- Even though I didn’t have a clear and prepared speech, and I shared that with my daughter, she decided to “save me” by writing down a little Manifesto for me to read to the people, which melted my heart and which really resonated with the group and I was so impressed and proud and grateful to her for coming up with this:
And to add the cherry on top my architect artist friend Paolo took the most incredible photos what was an unexpected cherry on top so overall, all the anxiety and feeling of unpreparedness aside I feel the was a positive experiment but possibly combining it with a PV was a bit too much to take on. But yet another realisation that keeping close relationships and taking care of ones community through well being experiments such as this one is very fulfilling, while simultaneously not enough to make a living but maybe if it is one of many things a person does than it can work.
