Artskool Exhibition Porto, Portugal

Portugal is a special place.
Porto was only my second trip to the country, but you know when you go somewhere and you just love it? Like there's this great energy around it and you could so see yourself living there? That is how I feel about Portugal.
I went by myself to attend the private view of the Artskool exhibition I'm taking part in. It's the first time I had the opportunity to see my work shown internationally and I was so excited. It's also only the second time I've exhibited internationally, the first, the show in Paris a few months prior.
I was really looking forward to seeing the other artists' work and meeting everybody. The first night I arrived, after checking in, I went to meet the others at their hotel, the few artists that came over from Paris. There was Adrian (the curator), Sophie (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts), and Emeric (Beaux-Arts) who made it to Porto on a 24 hour bus journey... and I felt bad for complaining about Ryan Air, Julian, another artist from Beaux-Art was too ill from the journey to make it out with us that night. Samantha, my friend and artist from the Slade shortly joined us and we headed out into the pouring, slashing rain to go to a party at the Universidade do Porto. Twenty minutes later we ended up dripping on the floor of the fantastic building the college is in only to find the party was cancelled, it was a BBQ. Oh.

In any rate we found one of those great Portuguese bars that's packed with young people drinking Superbock and chain smoking, and dried off there with a few beers and a side of pommes frites.
I was so nervous the next day about the opening.
So, I decided to call a friend of a friend's father's friend and do some sightseeing. Why not? The sun was finally out and it was an amazing day! The day out confirmed my love for Portugal, fantastic architecture, great food, and a beautiful beach.

Galeria do Palacio in Porto is a fantastic exhibition space. I couldn't believe that my work was hanging there and more shockingly that I liked it (disastrous visions of having to run out of the gallery after being discovered my work was accidentally accepted kept overwhelming me beforehand). It was such a great feeling to be pleased with my own stuff.