VirtuALL FestivALL Day Thirteen
June 26, 2020 by Rudy PanucciFrom now until near the end of June we will post at least once a day with details on what you can experience at home during this pandemic year for Charleston’s annual festival of all arts. For 2020, FestivALL is when The Internet Becomes A Work Of Art. Every day we will bring you up to date on this year’s VirtuALL FestivALL, plus we will flash back to some of our video coverage from previous years, and I will dig into the archives for one post in the Monday Morning Art Exhibit, collecting some of my favorite pieces from the nearly fifteen years that I’ve been posting my original work here in PopCult.
Today’s big events include:
Poems While You Wait–A very popular feature for FestivALL the past several years has been Poems While You Wait. Poet Laureate, Marc Harshman, was joined by one or two other colleagues in poetry and then, on old-fashioned, that is, real typewriters, produced on demand a poem for festival goers. This year for virtual simplicity the old typewriters will be gone, as will the tense, sweaty faces of the poets at work but… poems produced for our poetry-hungry, virtual readers will be on offer in real time. And for free — really! Simply follow the rules at the website they’ll see that an original poem by either Marc Harshman or Ron Houchin finds its way to you within forty-eight hours of your request. But hurry – they’re only taking the first 30 who registerstarting at 4 PM.
From April of 2019 we go back to two pieces that were done in advance to cover a trip out of town. Above you see “The Dancer” and below you see “The Dancers.” This is all in keeping with our flashback dance theme for today.
These are charcoal pencil drawings done on regular copy paper, enhanced with wax pencil “inking” techniques. It was around this time that I finally became comfortable with my drawing ability after regaining the use of my fingers. Both of these pieces were further enhanced digitally, to get the sharp contrast that I wanted, and to darken the blacks. The whole idea was to play with lighting and exagerrating what was in the original photos on which these were based.
Click the images to see them bigger.