Say something beautiful or be quiet: Urban Arts Platform, Johannesburg.

The Urban Arts platform is a multidisciplinary arts organization based at the art deco Ansteys Building on Joubert and Jeppe Street in Johannesburg CBD. For many of the young residents of this building, play is often restricted to the building itself so UAP was set up to cater for them to engage in a wide variety of artistic projects.
During my recent visit to the city I was invited by Leigh Nudelman of UAP to take part in a one day arts workshop with the young residents of the building. The brief was pretty simple. We have one day, possibly stretching into two to transform their art room wall into something more colourful.
To do this we would need to pull out all the stops and paint in a frantic pace to achieve our goal in the short amount of time we had. Hand prints, paint splats, drippy paint techniques and some drawing references were all used to make the wall happen.
The theme was ' Love Joburg' and featured a leopard fish ( we made that up) swimming with a big rope chain and a big snake with its body spelling out the word.
The task was completed in about 5 hours with some finishing being done on the Sunday.
The Urban Arts Platform is a great project that engages the young people and I hope to work with them in the future again.
For more information on the Ansteys kids projects or if you could help go here : http://displayartproject.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/exciting-workshops/ or email urbanartsplatformjhb@gmail.com.
Many thanks to the residents at the Ansteys building, Leigh Nudelman, Juliet,Gina Cooperman and Nkosinathi Zulu at the British Council for the support.