Intelligent Drawing

Andrew Gwilt is a trainee of Level Best Art Café in ArtCo, the art department. This show is a collection of some of his drawings. Andrew grew up in Norwich and now lives in Wickford in Essex. He attends the café every Thursday and since he first started with us he has been a master of his own unique style of map making. We were so impressed with his single minded vision, sense of purpose and prolific amount of work that we felt he deserved a solo one man show in our gallery. 
Each frame has at least 2 A4 drawings within.

1. ' A414 Vicary / NHS'

Pen drawing on paper

£40

£10 without frame

Andrew said “Since I was 5 my dad used to go through the family atlas with me and after college I began to draw technical plan drawings and maps, using the atlas and Google Earth as reference. I now can draw my maps accurately from memory and do so every week, as well as producing digital work with Google maps and Microsoft paint, to indicate routes people can travel”.
 

2. 'A134 Colchester / Welcome To Felixstowe'

Pen drawing on paper

£35

£10 without frame

 

Andrew’s maps are chiefly concerned with routes, either motorways, railways or simple pathways including such details as roundabouts, road signs and pylons. His accuracy and wealth of knowledge is staggering and he is interested in construction projects around the world present and future. Some projects Andrew has told us about recently include maintenance to the Tokyo highway system, the new 9 car electric locomotive to be introduced to London and the far off planned project for a bridge to the Isle of Wight and a transatlantic rail and road tunnel to connect western Ireland to Southern New York, with 5 service stations along the route under the Atlantic ocean.

 

3. 'Premium Hotels Collage'

Pen drawing on paper

£100

£20 without frame

Andrew says “I like to get my maps accurate; if I make a mistake such as wobbly lines or inaccuracies I will start again”. When asked how he felt about having his work publicly displayed for the first time in our Gallery he said “It is a good opportunity to see how good I am, I’d like to become a popular artist and photographer”.

4. 'A414 Bypass / Watford Shopping Centre'

Pen drawing on paper

£40

£10 without frame 

 5. 'Midland Mainline / road and pylons'

Pen drawing on paper

£40

£10 without frame

6. 'London Liverpool street / Shenfield signals'

Pen drawing on paper 

£40

£10 without frame

7. 'Newton Flotman / BP BD'

Pen drawing on paper  

£40

£10 without frame 

8. 'Primrose Hill & Park / North Rd'

Pen drawing on paper  

£40

£10 without frame

9. 'Camden Market / Holiday Inn Colchester Central' 

Pen drawing on paper

£40

£10 without frame

10. 'Welcome To Felixstowe 1 mile / Liss' 

Pen drawing on paper  

£35

£10 without frame 
 

11. 'Ham barn Junction’ 

Digital image

 £40

£10 without frame

12. 'Norwich & Ipswich’ 

Pen drawing on paper  with colour

 £5 unframed

 

13. 'Basildon & Thurrock District Council’ 

Pen drawing on paper  with colour

  £5 unframed 

 

14. 'Braintree District Council’ 

Pen drawing on paper  with colour

  £5 unframed 

 

15. 'Colchester’ 

Pen drawing on paper  with colour

  £5 unframed 

 

16. 'Norwich / Stowmarket’ 

Pen drawing on paper  with colour

  £5 unframed

Andrew’s show lasts from July 20th - August 17^th 2012 and can be viewed here at Level Best Monday – Friday, 9am – 4pm

Level Best Art Cafe, 3 Culver St East, Colchester, Essex, CO1 1LD  01206 366059 artcolevelbest@gmail.com  

Level Best T Towels

The back story

We began our project to help out with Colchester In Bloom. As the weather this year has not been great for growing enough flowers, we made our own artificial ones out of yellow plastic bags and tea towels with flower patterns on, to help with our window box displays.

When we had made enough Colchester In Bloom tea towels, we decided to expand on the project as we had a taste for the process.

Other themes for Tea Towels have included The Cutty Sark (as Jane wanted to sell at a stall in Greenwich market), elephants, fish squares, mermaids, The Wanted (the band), various abstracts and a specialty tea towel for Franklins who donated us a sewing machine (commissions welcome). Coming soon will be themes on wildlife and space.

The Process

The T towels are made from 100% cotton, or a linen and rayon mix bought from Franklins and Fabric8. The designs are drawn with Dylon fabric pens and painted with fabric paint. These colours are fixed by ironing, then the edges pinned and sewn using our lovely sewing machine, generously donated by Franklins on St Botolphs Street Colchester, Essex CO2 7DU

(selection of some of the T Towels produced)

Sale

Each T towel is produced either by a trainee with a vision or a group of trainees working on different elements of a pattern and we are accepting offers of between £3 and £20 for each.

And if you need any more encouragement as to how necessary a good towel is, here’s Douglas Adams with his thoughts in the Hitchhikers Guide To The galaxy;

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."