How was your Culture Night?

We had such…an…amazing…time!

Huge, huge thanks to everyone who attended our Cartoon Workshop or the Let’s Draw! late event, and all the people at Galway City Council, the French Embassy, Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, The Live Drawing Project, and of course Culture Night itself.

You gave a lot of people in Galway, of all ages, backgrounds and walks of life, a night to remember.

It has to be said it was an amazing evening all round, with a fabulous atmosphere throughout Galway’s city centre. Culture Night has really taken off in this city in the last few years. Middle Street in particular was a creative fairyland thanks to the efforts of Fíbín and An Taibhdhearc.

Our contribution began there too, at 6 pm in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, with a cartooning workshop for all ages led by Margaret Nolan and Richard Chapman with the assistance of Harry Burton. About 30 participants joined in our creative drawing games, crowded in amongst the shelves of art books.

This was followed at sundown by Let’s Draw!, a Culture Night Late event at the Spanish Arch. Here French street spectacle group The Live Drawing Project used their innovative software – and a truly enormous projector – to blast drawings onto the old city museum building. These were created by the audience on their mobile devices, led and inspired by the cartoonists we invited.

These guests were Graeme Keyes of The Phoenix fame, Harry Burton of the Irish Examiner, and Brazilian comic artist Mari Rolin. Festival director Richard Chapman also drew live, and online contributions came in from past festival guest the wonderful Liza Donnelly of The New Yorker as well as upcoming participants Joey Mason – currently artist-in-residence at Áras Éanna on Inis Oírr – and Lucie Arnoux.

A special thank you also goes to animator Charlotte Connolly, who stepped up out of the audience to do one final gigantic drawing when the rest of us were exhausted…

As you can see from the images, the mood was out of this world. Somewhere around 2,000 members of the public used the web portal to contribute an astonishing 10,000 drawings to the event.

And Kate said Yes!