19Nov
I want to summarise the main messages of this expanding website:
1: the triple-horizontal bar at the top of the screen takes you to the main menu.
2: The 'Blog' takes you to the series of ideas I've had for possible contents of the planned festival. As you will see I want the festival to celebrate the rich cultural heritage of the West Wight from the Jurassic and Neolithic through Robert Hooke to the Victorians and on to recent 20th century creatives and to creative people working now in the 2020s.
3: the festival will be made and 'performed' or presented by young people
4: the festival will contain a wide range of performances, exhibitions and practical workshops designed for young people to discover and polish their creative skills
5: We intend to create an interactive 'peer-learning network' to put young creatives in touch with other learners, and with experienced media-designers and other professional content-creators who can help.
6: We plan to establish a charitable trust or other not-for-profit social enterprise, to build a business-plan, and then to raise money from the Arts Council, the National Lottery and other possible funders to deliver a WestWight Culturefest. As part of this we will be looking to recruit an entrepreneurial 'director' or facilitator who will be employed to bring the festival to sustainable fruition, so that it can grow year by year and provide a permanent learning-resource for young creatives in whatever area they wish to explore.
7: The world's creative industries are expanding rapidly to accommodate new technologies (like ChatGPT & AI) and newish skills like blogging, content-creation, short-form video, influencing, Python, Javascript and Type-Script. And we want our CultureFest to provide a permanent resource to facilitate these skills.
Just some of the West Wight cultural heroes - from top-left: surrealist poet David Gascoyne, artist and Limerick-writer Edward Lear, Tenniel's drawing of Alice in Wonderland, Pre-Raphaelite artist and model Marie Spartali, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron; the polymathic scientist-artist Robert Hooke of Freshwater and the Royal Society, the singer-songwriter Emma Swift of Blonde on the Tracks, inventor John Herschel who coined 'photography' and 'snap-shot' and invented fixative, the poet Christopher Logue on stage at the IOW Festival 1969, Tracey Deare lighting Derek Barran's Totland Pier, bibliophile book-seller Gail Middleton/Weir-Downey, painter Anna Keen, Dave-Roe-graphics for 1969 Festival, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: drawing of Marie Spartali, Dimbola Art-Rag Sporadical, singer-songwriter-poet Robyn Hitchcock; William Makepeace Thackeray, GF Watts portrait of Ellen Terry, the historian and socialist AJP Taylor of Yarmouth Mill, the writer and naturalist Jacquetta Hawkes of Brooke Hill House, William Holman Hunt's painting of Tennyson's The Lady of Shallott, Charles Darwin, photographed at Redoubt House by Julia Cameron, playwright Julia Darling of Plevna House - Jim Morrison of The Doors at 1970 IOW Festival, writer and radio-commentator JB Priestley of Brooke Hill House.
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