Artistic chaos at the Draw-A-Thon Theater
With the red curtain pulled aside, I enter into the street-level performance space of the Gershwin Hotel. The room is filled with people, their laps full of drawing pads, canvases, paints, charcoals, and crayons. Their many chairs encircle the following scene: a dozen yelling and shaking art models, hanging off prop-ladders and wallowing in paint-splattered newspaper and odd, handmade props. They’re draped in plaster casts, torn aprons, paper bag diapers, sunglasses, gutted accordions, paint and nothing.
This is Brooklyn artist Michael Alan’s Draw-a-thon Theater and this isn’t your art school’s figure-drawing class.
This time the theme is, “The Exorcist.” Each model is possessed by some agonizing mental malady as the artists draw their nude figures and wild acts. Alan walks through the chaos dressed as a priest, restoring the howling sufferers to erratic happiness and steadier-for-drawing poses. The instructions’ effects wears off after a while, making for a chorus of mentally unstable ramblings: “Bills, bills, bills”; “Whoever is doing that, STOP IT!”; and “That’s a beautiful hat, Patrick, you should wear it all the time.” Eventually chaos is put on pause: “Now freeze for 15 minutes,” it is announced, and the commotion hushes to the background of a live band and artists’ scribbling.
Patrick Bucklew ("Mangina") models as an artist paints the scene
After a few hours, I caught up with one of the models, Patrick Bucklew. He goes by his performance artist name, “Mangina,” so I asked the obvious question: Why?” “I’ve been doing this for eleven years,” he tells me. “It’s like therapy. Especially tonight, there was a lot of good riff-raff.” Bucklew spent most of the night proudly sporting a prosthetic leg and vagina cast while “riff-raffing” with a mulleted maid in runny make-up.
I’ve been to Draw-a-thon several times, in venues from Manhattan’s theater rehearsal rooms to DUMBO lofts to Alan’s compact, packed Brooklyn apartment with the models crawling on top of his television set and hanging out of his kitchen sink. Artists, painters and doodlers flock from all over the city and most are ready to reflect the chaos.
The next Draw-a-thon event will be a five-hour take-over of the Chelsea Art Museum’s main floor. The theme is the Factory and it’s planned to be Alan’s greatest feat yet. Join the madmen this Friday night at 7 or at any of the upcoming, bi-monthly events. Your wild side will thank you.
—Marina Galperina
3 Comments | Posted on June 19, 2009 | Categories: Event-Related, From the Blog
type-o great pictures and i thank you for that! however i would like to correct the quote where you ask how long i havebeen doing this. i have been doing this for 11 years! thanks patrick aka mangina