Art has always been a refuge for Drew Walker, ex-King’s College Wimbledon boy with a vision to change the world. He’s used his talents as a sought-after portrait artist, extraordinary musician, and dancer to join forces with Chichi, the love of his life, and form The Loving Collaborative.
At school, the Art Department was the temple where I found communion with myself. During free periods, break times, and lunches, the many pianos my school was blessed with provided “keys” to unlock lost nodes of expression, paramount to my peace. When I became a couple with my best friend, Chichi, I instantly began my process to step out of the terrain of my inner creative bubble, my internal dialog, into the unknown realm of self-exposure, expression and vulnerability. My healing through art had never been up for critique – it was my safe place. If I wanted to love and be loved, I couldn’t be the only resident in my safe place – I needed to trust and learn how to open that door. This is really a love story. A story of how, as my song goes: “When I fall in love with you, I fall in love with myself; and when I fall in love with myself, I fall in love with the world.”
At the tender age of 26, in 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar and beginning of our new life, we flew to Argentina with a return ticket for three months. Eight years on, I have an Argentine son, and learnt that return tickets are best kept flexible. In 2012, we started on a piece of land in Mendoza where Chichi had lived the year before with nothing but a séquia (a community-operated watercourse used for irrigation). Now we have a little prefab house.
I was working on a commission for a friend (a portrait of Bob Dylan), while Chichi was going out to a community of illiterate and highly-abused women working under horrific conditions, where she began conceiving a project to bring the women a sense of self and of self-worth. The project was a Jackson Pollock-inspired artwork that used beauty theory, chaos theory and play theory techniques to allow the women to create freely without the possibility of making a mistake. The women didn’t use precision grip to clasp the paintbrushes, as they didn’t hold a pencil in weekly writing classes, but they were able to express and release in a way that art allows all to do. Art provides a relief to mental illness, boosts mental health. This set a precedent for the world I had entered: the world of Chichi; the world of art outside of my own personal healing; the world of Argentina.
Eight years later…
In the eight years that followed, Chichi and I have travelled to Brazil, Mexico, Bulgaria, Guatemala, through Argentina, and back to London (now with a one-year-old baby) carrying with us the creative tools that Argentina has generously showered us with since 2012. Having previously studied in the UK, we are enrolled at Argentina’s National University of the Arts in two degrees: in the Department of Folklore, studying Tango, and in the Department of Movement, studying Expresión Corporal, which I call a degree in self-love, but is the study of expressing through the body. Prior to enrolling, we had been dancing tango since arriving in Argentina, through ways that really epitomise the manner in which the art process is truly available for all, echoing the great abundance of the Iguazú Falls in the North.
We were invited to learn with our neighbours, professional dancers who had travelled all over the world with Tango and who were back in Buenos Aires with their baby, starting their Tango school in their converted basement studio. We then got wind of a local Cultural Centre that gave open and free classes to anyone in a plethora of disciplines, from choral singing, through Tango, to Latin Percussion, and everything in between. We would frequent a maelstrom of milongas (where people meet to dance tango), and this is what began to truly connect us to our community.
A chance meeting…
It was indeed in one of Buenos Aires’ free nightly milongas that we bumped into a milonguero friend who told us about the degree in Expresión Corporal that he was studying. This degree is perhaps the one that has most synthesised everything that Chichi and I now do with The Loving Collaborative. As I said, in a nutshell, it is a degree in self-love, and as love seems such a kaleidoscopic, constantly changing field of unknowns and unexpecteds, más vale que tenga su propia carera! (with good reason it has its own degree!) Within this degree we study Feldenkrais, the “resetting” of the self through corporal postures, practises, and internalisation, as well as Contact Improvisation, the improvised dance that made me howl in 2012 when I first saw it performed, centred on playing with a continual contact, which, through its constant varying in degree, creates its own irreproducible flavour and form. And to name one more, Senso-perception, a teaching which takes the student on an odyssey of the senses through enhanced perception and understanding of physiological and neurological processes. Chichi has designed a 45-minute workshop (available on our website) for couples expecting a baby, offering a senso-perceptive journey into the many worlds that are being born every moment inside of the mother, and osmotically, inside of the partner too.
Perhaps what has been most grounding of all for me, though, is that all of this is available for everyone. The Cultural Centres offer classes at either no charge, or for a donation, including to me as a foreigner; every night in Buenos Aires there are milongas, which don’t charge for entry; and to study at the National University of the Arts, neither I nor the locals have to pay. It is this attitude to the sacrosanctity of the arts that drives us today, so that art might begin to be felt as something FUNDAMENTAL to our species, rather than seen as a privilege.
Our Collaborative is born…
This is why my partner and I founded The Loving Collaborative. Our mission is to make the arts relevant and accessible to all. The portraits are commissioned according to what you can afford, so that you can give the ultimate gesture to someone you care about; the music is available for free or for a donation; and the workshops that combine dance, movement, sound, play theory, self-directed education, painting, and more, are all created to tackle a variety of life’s processes and human relations, from pregnancy to illiteracy.
And it is all donation-based, so anybody of any age or financial situation can enjoy it if they wish to. It is set up as a co-operative, so anyone who helps in the creation of music, art, or a workshop is paid a percentage of the donations, providing the opportunity to be creative while earn fairly.
So if you are trying to think of a unique, beautiful gift for someone special, consider a portrait. If you want to hear music that tells a story about life, go on our Bandcamp. If you feel like trying a workshop in movement or something new, visit thelovingcollaborative.com, and find what is right for you. Your donation will be greatly appreciated, helping us continue creating art to make life awesome for others, too.
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