The Big Draw Review #1
“The Big Draw”, presented by The Drawing Center as well as being part of the River to River Festival, made its second appearance in New York City. “The Big Draw”, a popular arts program in the United Kingdom comes to New York to share one day of free artistic fun with everyone. Spread over five locations in Lower Manhattan, “The Big Draw” provided unique activities at each of these locations. Such activities included discovering the secret of Asian Calligraphy, knitting and crocheting, ordinary scenery drawing, drawing objects in motion, as well as graffiti laser tag (which was cancelled). Most of these events were held at the same time making it impossible to experience all these events fully if one wanted to visit them all.
My first event was at the South Street Seaport, which the topic was discovering the secret of Asian Calligraphy. Upon arriving at the stall with volunteers, I was given a sketchbook as well as several tracing papers and told to trace a black and white picture of the river view. The next activity is the drawing boards on the broad walk. Next to the bucket of water (which is the ink) were brushes that were two to three feet long. I tried imitating some Chinese characters on the board, but trying to control the movements was difficult because the brush was long and rough. The drawback to this activity was before I could finish; I noticed that the first half of my drawing already dried up. I looked around but I could not see the artist that was there to help teach and explain the event. I suppose the heat was just too much for everybody. Other participants were mostly drawing or tracing the river view. At the end of this event, which lasted less than half an hour, I decided to move onto my next event.
My next event was located at the World Financial Center. The topic of this event was learning to knit, knot and crochet. This event was better planned than the South Street Seaport event. There was an overhead tent, along with seats providing shade and comfort for participants knitting. There were about 20 kids and parents sitting and knitting. I took a shot at knitting and asked for help from one of the volunteers. Knitting was a lot harder than expected. I frequently messed up, requiring me to do it over again or ask for help. The best part of this event would be the ability to throw yarn around two vans. There were many kids playing with yarn within the “yarn webs”.
In conclusion, the experience at these two events was fair. The gain from “The Big Draw” event was that it provided people with the opportunity to do some creative art activity (such as throwing yarn around freely), which would never be done on a normal basis. However, this event would not be appropriate for other teenagers or adults without children because it felt like a playground rather than an artistic event. Just being there gave me a sense of awkwardness. I would not recommend this event unless they move the activities indoors and actually include exciting events for people besides kids.
