Artist in Pubs...

I attended this event on Friday 15th November in Leeds.
It was in a nice little back room of a pub, I think more people attended than were expected so it was quite cramped. It was a very informal atmosphere and the artist sat at the bar and explained a bit about his work, then took a few questions

Henry Moore Institute events announcement 
Friday 15 November 6-8pm
External event at Whitelock's Ale House, 4 Turk's Head Yard, Leeds LS1
6HB - http://www.whitelocksleeds.com/

'Art History in the Pub' - Paul Becker, The neglected and wholly
fictitious British sculptor, Anton Lesseman 

Collaboration with the Association of Art Historians

There was also a handout of images that related to what he was talking about:

Listening to the artist talk about this character he had created was fascinating. At first I was a bit sceptical about this idea as I wasn't sure if it was kind of unfair for a viewer to think it was a real person. But after he explained that he is not interested in trickery. There is no doubt this isn't a real person and he isn't trying to fool anyone into thinking so. I was amazed at how much depth he had gone into writing a 200 page biography for Anton Lesseman, drawings, sketch books, diaries. The final work is archived in the Henry Moore archive.

One point I found interesting was how he came up with the idea. Having creative block and not being able to work as yourself. Taking yourself away from your normal way of working and generating an alter-ego in a way, I feel this could be a great tool to experiment and motivate a person to creating different and interesting work to what they normally do. 

I have to admit some of what was said I didn't quite understand. There was a lot of highly trained arts people in that room including the head of archiving at the Henry Moore institute and head of the institute! It was really interesting hearing their input at the end and a lot of really innovative questions were asked to the artist after the talk. I think the questions at the end were my favourite part of this talk. 

One man talked about student writing dissertations and questioned if the approach to this would be more interesting if they did it from the point of view of someone else. A made up character, I found this an exciting prospect which could have interesting results.

 Although the subject matter of this talk was quite different from my current practice I enjoyed interacting with the people there and I found the artists approach unusual and exciting. This talk has opened my eyes upto different ways of approaching creating artwork.