Over the next week I chased the Embassy and it paid off. They had as I thought, been busy with the Olympics, but were now able to engage in dialogue. We set up a meeting for the 10th Sept, how exciting.
I’d originally hoped Laura would be able to attend with me but now I asked a fellow artist on the project – Ignacio – this was the obvious choice really as he is from Argentina and a great asset when going into a meeting with Spanish speaking people. Especially when what Spanish I did learn seems to have deserted me!
A skype call to Bolivia also proved useful and a friend of Philly (Matt) was now going to keep things going while she was on vacation. They had received the photos of the artists and some children had already started painting sessions. Matt was in charge of the library organisation Biblioworks that I mentioned earlier, and between them they had managed to get 31 children painting! Utterly Amazing! They were now in the process of collating all the names, ages and who they had painted, so we could pass this onto the artists.
But this presented with it a new dilemma… can you guess what it is yet?
In their enthusiasm to encourage participation, and with lots of shiny new materials, they had allowed the children to choose who they painted/drew. This resulted in a much larger number than required taking part and some painting the same artist. In fact one artist had been painted 6 times!!!
What now? We only planned to paint one child each. Each artist had offered to get involved and donate one painting to auction to raise money for the street children and magazine. How could we now choose only 14 from the 31? Which 14? What about the others? Surely I couldn’t ask let alone expect any artist to contribute more than one piece? How do I get around this? …
