Pop Art!

Look at this amazing gallery! Wouldn't Katie love it?



These are photos of the model created by Fabrizio Panella (pictured) and Gabriella Malewska for the Pop Up Picture Pavilion - my curated space at the Pop uP Festival of Stories 2012.

The Pavilion will be open from 12 - 6pm on Sunday July 1st, and quite apart from being a magical space in it's own right, lots of artists will be joining me to help children fill it with their own art. Superstars Vanessa Stone, Clara Vulliamy, Peter Jones and I will all be using famous paintings as a starting point to create magical new masterpieces, which will be exhibited in the gallery for all to see.


There will many other amazing things over the whole weekend: Vampire, comics and carnivals on Saturday; the Pop Up Picture Pavilion and a Roald Dahl Disco on Sunday - and much much more!

For full details click HERE: http://pop-up.org.uk/pop-up-picture-pavilion/ 

REMEMBER IT'S ALL FREE!

Roll up, roll up and… POP UP! Here it comes! The best book festival known to man (or beast)!

IN JUST TWO WEEKS I will be working with Clara Vulliamy and another artist, Vanessa Stone, in a unique and spectacular space: Let me introduce to you to…. (drum  roll)…

THE POP-UP PICTURE PAVILION

A magical gallery where art comes alive! Created by set design students (Fabrizio and Gabriella), from my concept, the gallery will  have crazy recreations of masterpieces  and these will be added too throughout the day as gradually the gallery is filled with more and more art created by … CHILDREN!

Here  you can see one "masterpiece" inspired by Turner, created at the Guardian Open Day a few months ago, which will be part of the exhibition. 

Also, here are some of the early sketches and designs for the pavilion. And you can see Clara, Vanessa and Gabriella enjoying tea and cake at Eat Shop Do, just round the corner from the Festival site. Which is:

Granary Square, Kings Cross (beside the new Central St Martin’s School of Art).

One of the festival highlights of last year was creating a giant pop up book for the very first (award winning) pop up festival. Now I’m back, joining an amazing line up: 

Sarah McIntyre, Marcus Sedgwick, Clara Vulliamy, Vanessa Stone, Candy Gourlay, Nii Parkes, Laura Dockrill, storytellers and bookshops and music and… oh so many things! Come and see for yourself, it’s all FREE !!!

BUT: Important note: the two days feature DIFFERENT line –ups. So check carefully. Or just come BOTH days! I’ll be there on Sunday July 1^st from 1pm. So come along and help me create the biggest and best children’s gallery of magic art EVER! (and stay a while for some stories too).

For full details, visit the Pop Up Website: http://pop-up.org.uk/pop-up-picture-pavilion/http://pop-up.org.uk/pop-up-picture-pavilion/

SEE YOU THERE!

Don't Rain on My Parade!

Well it did rain in the end. It poured down and what should have been a jubilant day was, let's be honest, a typical English wash out...

The trains were overcrowded, stations were closed to try to cope and it was a bedraggled assortment of loyal subjects who joined in with the jubilee.

As for Katie in London at Battersea Park, I was amazed and delighted than anyone showed up, not because of the weather but because, for some reason, my session had been timetabled to clash exactly with the Flotilla's arrival at Battersea. I didn't think I could quite compete with Her Majesty!!!

But as the crowd to see her was apparently 20 deep, a few families decided that a digital screen wasn't good enough, and they abandoned the riverside crowds for the relative sanity of the tee pee tent I was in. At least I was real!


I told stories linked to London and the English Flag: The Peddler of Swaffham and St George & The Dragon (for the England flag is the flag of St George). And I ended by reading the Jubilee edition of Katie in London. But by then everyone was cold and fed up and was heading for home.

I did the same myself... but as this coincided with heavy rain, everyone had the same idea - and all the tube stations I tried were closed to due to dangerous levels of overcrowding. Buses were few and far between as most roads were closed, and so I ended up walking with my family from the Thames all the way to Kings Cross. We were all wet through and felt like drowned rats. Honestly! The things I do!!!

The nearest I got to seeing any royalty was Fritha from Orchard books... looking very regal in this picture!

Still, the festival itself was fun, with a lovely vintage funfair and tables and sculptures made out of old books. A lot of thought had gone into it all, and it was a lovely browse. It felt good to be marking the day in some way at least even if the chance of seeing a single boat (never mind the Queen's) was next to zilch. So despite vintage car boot sales, and alternative village fetes and record breaking giant cakes and other frolics, there's no other way to sum it up than this:  it was a wash out!