Hasta La Ideas

Following on from our initial post on 100 Minutes of Havana last week, CR attended the Secret Wars-style battle event between a crew of artists selected by Monorex and a gang of illustrators selected by Intercity.

Much rum (all supplied by Havana Club, naturally) was consumed and in just 100 minutes, the artists pretty much covered the entire 16ft high, 40ft wide white space set aside for the battle.

The idea of the battle was to create imagery inspired by Havana Club and Cuba and the Monorex team, consisting of artists ALFA, Teck 1, Jimi Crayon, Mr K and Stika, took the left half of the battle wall and showed their skills at creating large scale works that can be appreciated from afar. Meanwhile on the right, after laboriously creating a large circular target (using a pen attached to a piece of string stuck to the wall with a drawing pin that rather amusingly wouldn’t behave), the Intercity team (consisting of illustrators Ian Stevenson, Andrew Rae, Robbie Wilkinson, Andy Forshaw and Austin from NEW) covered their side of the huge white space with quirky illustrations and hand drawn type – before hurling paint bombs of watered down acrylic paint at the canvas to complete the piece.

As with all battle events, there had to be a winner – and the Monorex team won out in the end, taking the public vote…

The finished battle artwork will remain installed at Village Underground and open to the public until 8 March

To see a film of the artwork being made, click here

For fans of live art, illustrator Andrew Rae will be getting his hands dirty all over again tonight at the Heavy Pencil event at the ICA. Flyer below:

Full details of the Heavy Pencil event can be found at ica.org.uk/Heavy%20Pencil+19105.twl