Bristol Cafe Kino, 2012

In 2012 I sometimes drew at an open life drawing group in the basement of Cafe Kino on Stokes Croft in Bristol, just a couple of hundred metres from my studio. I took a flimsy folding easel but it was often so crowded there that there wasn’t really room to put it up. The session was two hours with, usually, five and ten minute poses for the first hour, a ten minute break, and then a 50 minute pose. I usually worked in a sketch book, but it was too crowded to be able to move around, most people seated in stacking chairs with a sketch book on their knee. I did manage to get my easel up and complete a watercolour in the 50 minute pose on three occasions, but after a few weeks I gave up the struggle and stopped going.