4 Reasons to Attend Wales’ Most Anticipated Event of the Summer -Festival No.6

Previous headliners include Manic Street Preachers, Catfish and the Bottlemen, James Bay, Beck and so many more! Now on it’s 5th year, the highly anticipated and forever growing Festival No.6 is back! A smash hit with the locals and with the artists who come to play here’s four reasons why you should attend North Wales’ most picturesque and talked about festival!

1. Its Stunning Location.

The festival takes place in Portmeirion an Italian inspired village, a frequented place by tourists due to it’s colourful architecture and perfect location. The village sits on the Estuary of the Cambrian coast surrounded either side by sandy beaches and the mountainous snowdonia. There’s no boundaries here: Want to be on the beach? In the woodlands? No.6 has it all, all in one compact location. Fancy escaping the madness of the main arena for a while? Follow the nature trail round the outskirts of the village and get lost in the woodlands for a breath of fresh air (although, be warned there’s a high possibility you might run into a half naked rave or a chilled out acoustic session.) Or spend the day soaking up the sun then head back to the village for a night of music, madness and magic!

2. All the weird and wonderful visitors.

It’s no secret that No.6 attracts those of a more out there lifestyle, the vibrancy of the
festival brings out the more spirited and colourful of personalities! But don’t let this intimidate you, the friendly faces and welcoming mix of campers will have you embracing your inner hippy in no time! Take this chance to let go and relax around those that are carefree and are making the most of their weekend. Meet people from all over the country that come to a festival ready to dance the night away and those who are happy to sit in the village and take in the stunning scenery and cultural entertainment!

3. There’s something in it for everyone.

This year’s headliners are Bastille, Hot Chip and Noel Gallagher’s High flying birds and if that isn’t enough to tempt you then keep an eye out for all the other incredible talent coming in all sorts of mediums! There’s Choirs, theatre, comedy, food, health and healing! If there’s a festival that transforms you from one location to another and does it so well it’s No.6. Want to cure that hangover? Why not hit up a morning yoga session tho prepare your body for the evening of crazy dancing in one of the festival’s DJ tents. No matter whether you’re with friends, a partner or your family it’s clear this festival caters for everyone. Not only is there a pix’n’mix of entertainment but just because it’s a festival doesn’t mean you have to camp in an old tent from your garage. Why not try out Boutique camping?  One of the rooms in Castell Deudraeth or grab yourself an already set up tent to save you the hassle!

4. The Awards

A Festival like no other, it’s uniqueness and conversion into a world like no other it’s certainly had the recognition it deserves. No.6 has been nominated each year since it’s creation for UK’s Best Small Festival and then went on to win it in 2015, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s also won UK’s Best New Festival (2012), UK’s Best Festival Line-Up (2014) and NME’s Best Small Festival in 2013!

There is so much to this funky festival that it’s hard to describe its overwhelming dynamic in such a short article! If you want to find more information then check out their website festivalnumber6.com or their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/festivalnumber6/. Honestly, this is a festival you don’t want to miss! With not many tickets left if you can’t make it this year, make sure to make a note of it in your diary for next year!

Louise Wheeler: Art and Soul

I haven’t written about my art since my A level art days, so now post-uni I find it’s refreshing to sit down and write about my paintings. I think this response encapsulates my approach to my painting: it’s something I do because I love it, because I need it in my life, and I’ve never really paused to think about what my work means as a whole or why indeed I enjoy it so much. Spending time painting has always just been something I’ve done, it is my way of self-expression. So I believe painting has a therapeutic value for me.

My love of art has grown over the years: during the summers of my A levels, and first years at uni, I converted the family shed into my ‘painting studio’ and quite happily spent hours in there working at my easel. I did lots of oil paintings during this time as the shed was a good place to accommodate the mess and smelliness of oils and turps. Unfortunately, now I don’t have the access to that work place so I work mostly with watercolours and acrylics. Watercolour in particular is my favourite: it is so supple and versatile. I love being able to move it around the page and to merge various colours into each other before waiting to see what the final colour will turn out to be.

As an artist, my work is concerned with form and expression. I have never consciously created a piece with any particular political or historical reference. The artists that have influenced my painting style are the ones who are primarily concerned with form: Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, O’Keeffe. After a recent trip to Vienna I’ve become fascinated by the use of line, and the juxtaposition of the human figure with pattern and abstract forms, particularly seen in the work of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. I’ve recently begun to be inspired by Oskar Kokoschka’s expressionist style too.

I started by painting portraits, as I have always loved how the human face can be represented in so many dynamic ways. I became interested in abstracting a face by fragmenting it into almost broken shapes. In doing this I was trying to suggest ideas of how hidden away the interior mind is, and whether this hidden depth can ever be expressed on the surface of a face. By fragmenting a face I was trying to see if a person could still be recognisable, and what it is about a face that is so appealing to artists experimenting with form. My favourite of these portraits was one I painted of the musician Dan Croll. I was so pleased with the painting that I sent it to him, which he subsequently re-posted to his Instagram, something which was completely unexpected and very surreal!

Dan Croll, Watercolour

Indeed, my work focuses on the human form, and the expression of emotion through the use of intense colour. I find it something hard to explain in words, which is probably why I have to paint it. My compositions are nearly always abstract, and consist of the figure with lots of colour, shapes, and one or two other recognisable motifs. I find I work best, and most honestly, from my imagination, or from the memory of an emotion.

I enjoy drawing and painting from life (I recently painted two watercolours, one of an orchid flower, and the other of a still life of yellow courgettes with red chillies) but I’m not really interested in realism or trying to copy things to such an extent that the painting becomes a photograph. My main concern is to explore how the body responds to certain landscapes and environments, and how perception of surroundings can be expressed into certain abstract forms to offer a new perspective on a lived experience.

I’m always looking for the lines of certain shapes, be this a field, or a face, or a flower, and then abstracting these lines together. But most of all I love painting bold colours-if I could paint every blank wall with bright colours I probably would.

Have a look at my Facebook page for more pictures of my work:

https://www.facebook.com/louisewheelerart/

How Art restricted my self-confidence but also presented me with it

Back in the years of taking my GCSEs, I took part in the Duke Of Edinburgh Bronze Award (not sure I even got the certificate in the end). Required to do a certain amount of hours on a skill of our choice, I chose to take the skills of sewing my Nan had tried to teach me for years that one step further. Optimistically and passionately I decided to take on the challenge of creating a dress that would be specifically designed for women of a similar shape to me – think the pears; Beyonce, JLo, Alicia Keys (although, I’d be flattering myself comparing me to them). For most of us, school highlights our biggest flaws, it’s a time of peer pressure and dissatisfaction of not looking a particular way. But, in all honesty, I’ve always been relatively comfortable with my body, still, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I never wished I was taller or slimmer. When it came to beginning my project I was stuck in the same old rut of drawing figures that represented standardised fashion proportions instead of reflecting how I or these other women like me were truly shaped. For me, the designs didn’t look flattering or didn’t look enticing without the figures and their tremendously long legs or prominent cheekbones. It wasn’t until I went to a water-colouring class that I realised the unrealistic bodies I was creating. An older lady approached me to ask what I was doing, after explaining she politely said “why do you make them so thin? Why don’t you draw them like us? we’re the ones buying them.” She was right but, it was my own insecurities and what I dreamed of being that restricted me from creating a piece that complimented who I was. I was trying so hard to create a piece of clothing that celebrated a woman’s real body shape whilst at the same time acting ashamed of it. In reality, this is how the fashion world portrays their designs but I had the opportunity to use my art to change it.

Having wanted to be a fashion illustrator for so long Nuno Dacosta and Sabine Pieper represent a few favourites of mine along with Megan Hess who does pieces for Dior, Prada and Vanity Fair. Their works are produced by solid lines and seem effortlessly perfect, something I hope one day mine will be too. However, as are with things that are so perfect they are almost always far-fetched from reality, yet even now this is what I inspire my drawings to be like. So when it came to taking a life drawing class for the first time at the University I didn’t know how to begin – In awareness of mental health issues, the University were aiming to promote body positivity – I didn’t know how to sketch so freely like everybody else around me. It normally takes me hours to get one side of a face how I want it, let alone be given 3-5 mins to sketch a whole person. This was all down to wanting perfection. I wanted perfect lines of the body to reflect the skills of me as an artist but, I was missing the point, I was trying to draw things that weren’t there. I was trying to alter parts of the people I was seeing because I couldn’t do with the varied proportions on my page, ones that didn’t coincide with what fashion drawing had taught me. Yet as I looked on and a new pose began I started to understand the freedom of sketching without setting restrictions. As I drew the curves of the woman in front of me I realised the beauty of all our bodies. I looked upon her with admiration, aware that what I was producing on a page from looking at a real life woman in front of me was just as gorgeous as the rule-drawn ones in my fashion sketch books. How people held their bodies, how their bodies curved and didn’t curved became so attractive, and one particular artist who represents this same admiration for people just as much as me is Austrian born artist Egon Schiele.

Born in 1890 Schiele only lived to the young age of 28, yet he managed to produce a varied collection of spectacular pieces in his too-short life span. There is not one piece of his work that ceases to fascinate me. That doesn’t draw me to the details of our bodies which we usually criticise. Instead, for me, Schiele’s figurative drawings amplify the beauty of the lines of our bodies, that demonstrate the diversity of our anatomy (Astrid points out a similar point in FEATURE: The Media’s damaging impact on 21st-Century beauty). For years I have been fixated on the steady one-drawn lines used in illustration, the flawlessness and the ideal. Schiele throws all this out the window, he not only strips down his subjects but, with limited mediums he can give more depth to a piece of work than any artist I know. It’s a personal opinion that his pieces strike something inside. When I saw his collection at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the home of the young artist, it displayed a mixture of emotions. Many of the more detailed paintings looked unhappy and disfigured yet some although, their bodies demonstrated vulnerability at the same time illustrated confidence in a sexual and living nature. His works may not be as exposeing to us now as they were back in the 1920s, however, they still possess a confrontation of body image and sexuality that people are yet unable to face. We shy away from seeing our bodies as they really are, even without media influencing people to find a way to bring themselves down. The variations throughout his collections are unarguable, including his own self-portraits: with his famous-long hands, Shiele depicts himself in so many ways, using himself as a forefront of differences in association with our bodies. Life drawing has taught me the acceptance of loving who we are. Of course, I know there’ll still be days where I dislike how I look but I also believe that the bodies we have as humans, whether we are tall, short, curvy, slim, is the most beautiful thing in the world.

By Founder Lauren Victioria Edwards

An Exclusive Chapter from an aspiring novelist

As the summer gets into full swing and A Level exams are a thing of the past, so begins the detailed planning of a novel idea, that up until now has been drafted in the memo section of an out of date iPod. 18-year-old Jordan Edwards is an aspiring novelist from a small town in North Wales and has begun the next step in deriving a novel from his interests in business and politics. Take a sneak peek at the opening chapter of this corporate thriller and be just as hooked as I was!

CHAPTER I

Had one gentleman not decided to depart one of London’s tallest buildings via the seventy­fourth floor that day, perhaps Arthur Marshall might’ve made it home for dinner. The moment he saw the roadblocks and police barricades surrounding his office’s headquarters, he realised that he wouldn’t stand a chance of arriving for his wife’s homemade stew unless he left his chauffeur­driven Mercedes Benz and opted for the claustrophobic rush hour Jubilee line.

The so­called ‘jumpers’ got on his bloody nerves. How selfish must a man be for their final intention to be for half of the roads in Canary Wharf to be inaccessible? They seemed to be dropping like flies more often now than ever in the business district, sometimes hitting one a fortnight and always causing a headache for everyone within a square mile.

What’s worse, despite his constant questions and pressuring for answers from the police barricading the roads, Arthur had never been given a single notion as to who jumps from these windows, from which buildings, or how long it would take for them to clear the mess left behind. For a man as nosey as he was, this was torture in its own right. Of course he refrained from calling himself that, and preferred to use the word ‘interested’. ‘It’s just a matter of personal interest!’ he would insist to whichever officer was present to block the roads that day, only to be turned away, forcing him to grumpily waddle back to his car.

The whole ordeal had left him rather miserable, hunched over grumpily in his Armani suit as the tube dragged through London Bridge station, a distant three stops from where he would then have to change to the District line at Westminster. His face, stretched out long by the angled window opposite him, surprised him; it made him look even more miserable than he felt. The tube made him feel sick.

Arthur watched impatiently as the carriage sluggishly rolled through Southwark and Waterloo before finally halting in Westminster, where he would rejoin what looked and felt like hundreds of cattle attempting to clamber onto the same escalator. It seems that the traditional appearance of commuters on the tube should look similar to that of one of the most despondent groups of people on the planet, and yet even amongst this motley crew Arthur seemed to be trumping the competition.

The misery would only continue as Arthur hopped onto the District line for the final leg of the journey. Well, not necessarily hopped. Squeezed, perhaps, pushing his way onto a carriage with limited open space between other sombre passengers clutching the moist poles for dear life such that they did not fall into anyone else as the train jolted from the station and jaunted towards St James’s Park.

There were dozens of newspapers scattered across the carriage, some tattered, a clear sign of being read by passenger after passenger as they boarded the train, browsed quickly, and left the paper as they had found it on the dusty seats of the carriages before leaving the train. Others were newer, freshly bought from the shops and smelling strongly of the presses they’d left merely hours beforehand. What was common throughout the front pages, however, was the fact that a rather large mugshot of Arthur’s face accompanied by columns about his company, Arbicon, seemed to dominate the first few pages of most of these national publications.

It was for this reason that Arthur was grateful for the rush hour traffic of bodies to keep him hidden. At that moment in time, his face was perhaps one of the most acknowledgable in the country. On this tube carriage, it was buried deep between the shoulders of three other passengers, eyes focused on the floor such that Arthur took on the figure of a low­headed businessman having a tough day. The last thing he wanted was to be recognised.

The train screeched to a halt at Victoria. Almost immediately as the carriages had stopped shifting and shunting, the door flew agape and a flurry of passengers appeared to fly from the carriage and onto the platform. The bodies knocked past Arthur in quick succession and suddenly he was exposed. No longer were three shoulders around him to protect his face from the eyes of other passengers. Bugger, Arthur muttered. It had been years since he had had to ride the tube, and in that time he had completely forgotten that the train almost always empties at Victoria station. Despite the fact that everybody looks as though their heads are down looking at their phones and newspapers and shoes, all riders of the tube are constantly secretly watching each other, and even the tiniest of movements can often be noticed by everyone on the carriage. It could take mere seconds for him to be recognised if he stayed up here holding this pole. In fact, he had noticed a seated passenger wearing a press pass as he had boarded the train, and God knows that was the last kind of thing he wanted to deal with right now. Without tilting his head too high above his shoulder, Arthur gave the carriage a quick scan, covering as much of his face as possible with his fist as though to mimic a cough.

That was the moment he saw his opportunity. An empty spot had just opened up on a chair just a couple of metres away from him. Without thought, he leapt for it. He would be able to rest his legs and cover his face when sat down, which was a double win from his perspective.

Unbeknowingly to him, he was seemingly racing a woman perhaps forty years his senior to this Priority Seat designated specifically for the elderly and disabled, and he had arrived there more quickly not only because he was slim and athletic, but also because she was shuffling across the carriage excruciatingly slowly and relying on a walking stick for balance. The moment his behind graced the grubby purple cover of the seat was when he detected her approach. It was also the moment his expression blushed a deep shade of crimson. Several other passengers were regarding him strangely, and with a brief and particularly embarrassing ‘Sorry’ he was stood gripping the moist poles once again.

Suddenly the press pass reporter was advancing towards him with an outstretched hand. “You’re Arthur Marshall,” the reporter gasped incredulously.

“Last time I checked,” Arthur joked, without laughing.

“Alan Godfrey,” he announced, shaking Arthur’s hand rather too violently. “The press conference, I was there with the Huffington Post. You did such an excellent job­”

“­I was simply doing my job,” Arthur interrupted. The reporter stopped for a moment, analysing Arthur from head to toe, looking for a cuff out of place on his suit or a nose hair protruding from his nostril. These reporters were always looking for imperfections.

“Well if I may say so, I thought you were very brave. Ridding of the tyranny in the company, giving it a fresh new start. I do look forward to seeing those horrid factories torn to the ground.”

So vocal yet so thoughtless, Arthur thought to himself. “If I may remind you, those factories were my father’s idea.”

“Apologies, sir, I do forget. My condolences for his death.” Arthur felt the floor stop moving beneath his feet. He had lunged from the train sooner than the reporter could utter another meaningless syllable. Sloane Square station. A single stop from where he longed to be. Even so, hailing a taxi would be a world better than remaining on that train. He had heard so many condolences in the past couple of weeks he was beginning to feel like a funeral director. He rushed into the pouring rain without an umbrella and waited in the puddles for a taxi to arrive. Getting wet did not faze him, he just wanted to be home.

It was only when Arthur arrived home, not to the smell of fresh home­baked stew but to his wife leaning forward on the edge of the sofa, her palms cradling her shaking head ­ that he realised something was wrong. Not immediately panicked, he meandered over to her calmly, first placing his umbrella into the bucket by the door and hanging his coat neatly upon its hook. The children were always playing truant and worrying his wife, and her friends were constantly remarking about her behind her back. I wonder what’s got on her back today , he thought.

Although, something seemed different today. Not only was Aleksei Novakov, his personal bodyguard, regarding him worryingly, but the way his wife almost refused to gaze upon Arthur rather than leap up to him for his support was peculiar. He wondered whether she might’ve found out about him and Nikita, and suddenly he was nervous.

Yet as he approached, it was not upset that Arthur saw behind her dewy hazel eyes. It was fear. A fear which made her pupils dilate the moment she saw her husband coming towards her. She gestured towards the television, where a breaking headline story displayed the story of a man who, just hours ago, had leapt from the seventy­fourth floor of one of London’s tallest buildings. Arthur recalled the barricaded roads and no entry signs which had forced him to endure such a gruelling journey on the tube.

“Selfish bastard,” Arthur noted. “What of it?” he shrugged towards his wife, who pulled herself away from him as though he was going to destroy everything within his reach. Arthur, in no mood for playing games, placed his cool hand gently upon the area between her neck and breast, pressing upon the sweating diamonds of her necklace. “Tell me.”

“The suicide,” she gasped, without saliva to moisture her throat. “It’s Perry Hart.” A heavy look of defeat immediately broke upon Arthur’s face as he turned backwards towards the television to see Perry Hart’s face appear. The picture they’d chosen was staring blankly at Arthur from the screen as though mocking him. A single word dominated his thoughts like a childhood memory he just couldn’t be rid of;

Shit.