I struck up a conversation the other day with a man who had more than a passing resemblance to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. I have enough tact not to start a conversation with such a glaring statement but the similarities between them were uncanny with the same large red nose, massive teeth and incredibly long face. To tell you the truth it looked like one of the plastic joke ones given out for Comic Relief but, of course, I didn’t say that either. Instead I struck up a conversation about O’Neill cylinders in an attempt to bamboozle him, hopefully leading to a mild sense of confusion so that he would lower his defences and I could hopefully find out if he was actually somehow related to the famous reindeer.
I won’t bore you with the ensuing small talk but I did eventually find out that his name was Rosacea the red nosed human and he came to have such a big red nose due to a chance meeting he once had with a drunk fairy who thought it would be funny to make a human version of Rudolph. Over the years Rosacea hasn’t found it that amusing however…
For the inaugural Cheltenham Paint Festival we packed up the the id-iomobile and set off with high hopes. The weather for Saturday wasn’t meant to be very good and, for once, the weatherman was bang on the money. It stared off sunny but before long had descended into a maelstrom of wind and rain. Despite battling the somewhat inclement conditions we somehow managed to pull off ‘Our Lady of the Decoration’ before a very vigorous 6pm downpour. We’d had to dry the canvas half a dozen times but working outdoors in the UK in ‘summer’ time can be like that sometimes.
As we were painting just next to the Arts building at the University of Gloucestershire’s Hardwick Campus we thought we’d best try to come up with something classy but colourful and so went with our depiction of the three Muses or ‘Our Lady of the Decoration’ as we’ve decided to call it. The Muses are Aoide (song), Melete (practice) and Mneme (memory). If that doesn’t inspire the arts students then I don’t know what will. The white chevrons have been borrowed from the Uni’s logo so hopefully they’ll be down with it too.
A big thanks to Andy and all the rest of the crew who helped organise. A winning weekend to be sure.
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