Unforgettable, that's what you are

I'm on the floor sketching a cardboard cut-out and a Warhol drawing, Head of Boy with Fingers and Heart at Lips, from 1956. Is he guarding a secret or about to divulge one?

The monochrome cut-outs are here (at The Violet Crab - see previous post) for three days while Canadian-born designer Edeline Lee's autumn/winter collection is on display. Luke Leitch, fashion journalism's Mr Handsome, is being shown around.

Then I hop on a bus to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in Bloomsbury for the launch of the Centre for Law and Information Policy, directed by the strikingly alert Judith Townend.

Your private life drama baby leave me out. The theme is privacy law. We're here for a workshop and a lecture from Timothy Pitt-Payne QC - recently seen acting for the Information Commissioner in the Supreme Court case about the Prince of Wales's confidential memos to government departments.

Should you protect yourself by keeping your entire life private, or by having no private life at all? I refer you to Henry James's short story The Private Life in which he sticks it to Lord Leighton and Robert Browning while examining drastic privacy measures.

Drones are on the agenda - flying cameras which can see round corners. It's reported on the news that five mysterious drones confounded the gendarmes this morning, snooping around sites in Paris including the US embassy. Who, and why? Bertie Wooster's Drones Club members would have flown drones for fun. Dr David Goldberg reminds us that news chiefs are going to have to get to grips with aviation law, and that the Kodak Box Brownie caused consternation - a cheap spying tool in public hands.

In the tea-break, I sell a house, kind of. Somewhere in the house is a blue-barred jay's feather which I picked up when I was about nine. I can't hang on to everything. Never mind the right to be forgotten, I could do with a right to forget. Sadly, there is no right not to forget. I forget Egon Schiele's name today. The best I can manage is: 'You know, not Klimt, the other one.'

While I remember, my exhibition of Supreme Court drawings continues at the Broadgate office of Pinsent Masons LLP.

More pictures if you scroll down.

The Violet Crab at DRAF - part 2

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Drilling, hammering, a vacuum cleaner, no swearing except from me - sorry. I spend too much time alone.

I'm drawing the setting up of The Violet Crab at the David Roberts Art Foundation in Camden, a cabaret-themed exhibition designed and directed by Than Hussein Clark.

Sometimes I'm depicting other people's works here. Not copying but interpreting, as part of an established tradition - e.g. Zoffany's The Tribuna at the Uffizi.

Aristocrats on the Grand Tour are airing their aesthetic credentials. Zoffany has rearranged the works and imported others to suit his composition.

And I'll be drawing the opening night while I sit on stage as part of the cabaret. Help, I need something to hold my drawing clobber.

I go up Portobello Road. A battle-hardened sewing table says hello, where have you been? There is a tilth of rusty pins under its flowery lining. I buy some casters which allow it to make a self-important, fussy trundling noise on the hard gallery floor.  

Ayumi LaNoire performs an hypnotic dance of love and rejection on the golden pole designed by Than, the best she has ever used, she says. Tojan Thomas Browne and Taylor Yates dance as crabs in fake leopard.

The show is about colour.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, 
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold. 

More pictures if you scroll down, and in the previous blog post.