My first Tribeca Ball experience!

Hey everyone, its been a busy few weeks (as per usual) here in the big apple! Not long after my last post, my boyfriend was very sweet and surprised me out here, we had a fantastic time and I was able to take the first break from school work I’ve had since I got back here this semester! We had a great time, eating at lovely restaurants, exploring the city and we even went to an ice hockey match. One of the best places we went was to the comedy cellar, I haven’t laughed so much in a long, long time! Since we had a 45 min wait to go in, we sat up at the bar with a couple drinks, the bar itself was a chalkboard so I had a little scribble and drew Doug Stanhope!

Last Monday, the last night Gary was here, was Tribeca Ball! This is a big glamorous party held at the school where New Yorks finest come to visit our school to see our work and this year the event was in honour of the wonderful painter, Will Cotton. The night was amazing, NYAA certainly knows how to throw a party! There were ladies wearing exotic outfits walking around on stilts, a man playing a theremin, bands playing music and even live birds upstairs beside contortionists! The theme of the night was wildlife and many of the guests participated wearing animal patterned outfits, some had toy animals attached to them and there was even one lady who created a birds nest out of her hair…impressive is an understatement! During the event we were encouraged to stay in our studio spaces as guests came through to chat about our work, I made some good contacts and had some lovely chats with people about my work. There were some very cool guests too, Alan Cumming, Naomi Watts and Brooke Shields to name a few! The after party was also great fun as it gave myself and my fellow peers all a much needed and long awaited chance to hang out and party together. Just after the ball, I had a lovely visit with Gerard Burns, wonderful Scottish painter and a great friend. I had the pleasure of showing him around the school last week!

I’m now in the last month of my first year at the academy and I cannot believe how fast its flown in!! I have a few paintings in the works which should be finished in the next few weeks at which point I look forward to sharing them with you. I am so excited now for summer, I will be coming home to Scotland and I will be working hard on processing and really absorbing all I have learnt. If anyone fancies sparing 4 hours or so of their time over the summer, I will be looking for people to paint their portraits as practice (if you are interested send me a message)! I will also be using the time to cement my ideas for my thesis next year and I will keep up this blog to keep you up to date with my thought process for that. More exciting news too…I will be running a few week long classes on all I have learnt out here in August! More on that to follow!

Anyway, till next time folks!

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