Art in the Village, London, 24 June 2026

29 Jun 2026

My return to pose for Art in the Village was my first since last June, my sixth overall, at my fifth different venue, all in the Muswell Hill/Highgate areas of London. It was an exceptionally hot, humid, heatwave day in the city, but we had a relatively cool space in the back room of Muswell Hill Books and Parlour, with two hefty portable fans.

Art in the Village’s founder and driving force is Cleo Harrington. As ever, she was on top of the details and attentive to everyone’s needs but on this occasion she gave the tutoring reins to artist Mark James. This opened an opportunity for artists to consider the figure in the abstract; much of Mark’s own practice focuses on abstractionism.

Exercises included overlaying continuous line drawings created with different colours without looking at the paper (short poses) and defining the figure’s outline by drawing the backdrop to the figure rather than the figure itself (longer poses). In the heatwave conditions, this may have been a conceptual overload for a few of our artists!

The main thing is that everyone entered into the spirit of the exercises, even if one or two couldn’t help reverting to their comfort zone of drawing from direct observation. It still provoked thought and discussion, and yielded some interesting results. I enjoyed it all immensely. A combination of nice people and original ideas always pleases.