Sketch at Home with Bryant Sina
In a parallel universe, the last weekend of March was all about celebrating the decade since we came out with our first t-shirt. This celebration included a day of art-making with installations by our friend Bryant of Haus of Godspeed. With art supplies on deck and ready to be played with, people came to our pop-up shop to create with us.
But. As you know. We are in the universe with the big COVID19 and those plans had to be pinned with a "save-for-later" note.
Except... I wasn't trying to save all our ideas for the unknown end date to this chapter. After a week of crying, another week of adjusting, and another week of my creativity slowly finding its way back, I hit up Bryant and asked if he'd be down to turn our drawing event into a virtual one. I expressed to him how much I miss building community & art with others; he responded that he felt the same.
So, together with Sam@Empire & Bryant on Sunday 4/19, we hosted Sketch at Home: a still life sketch session made to help bring out the creativity in each other.
If you're unfamiliar with Bryant, he's a multidisciplinary artist from the East Bay and we've worked with him for various events since 2014. Most recently, if you were at our summer market place Growth, he was the artist behind the giant Be Happy paper-made mural.
For Sketch at Home, Bryant put together an installation with his signature combination of earthly things and inanimate objects, giving us a glimpse of his creativity's complexities. Making sure the installation breathed in good spirits, greenery weaved through while crystals amplified the produced landscape's energy.
Artists from the Bay Area and beyond -- even out-of-state! -- joined us on Sunday and built this new community with us. This isn't even everyone!
Art events do not just center around enjoying artwork, they are also made to get to know other artists. We wanted to cultivate that same type of welcoming feeling we would in a normal event so we regularly invited everyone to hold up their progress and invited them to share their art pages in the chat and to discuss their own processes.
Here are some of the pieces that were shared :
And here's work by Bryant himself:
We asked folx to drop a "1" in the chat if they'd like us to host Sketch at Home again. The results:
This is definitely the first Sketch at Home, not the last. The outside world may be chaos right now and we're collectively grieving but, because of all of you who joined us on Sunday, were able to have a happy moment of peace through it all.
To conclude this blog post, I want to share with you the tarot cards Bryant's friend Michele aka Trap Velma pulled for our group's reading:
She told the artists that the cards have spoken well for us and our artwork. She encouraged us to continue creating despite external negativity.
And that's what we'll continue to do and why we'll have a Sketch at Home pt. II
Stay tuned.