Teenagers go to the wall in the cause of art

YES! There are young people in Bexhill!

And to prove the point, the De La Warr Pavilion is presenting Grennan and Sperandio with an innovative programme called Heaven Can't Wait.

A massive wall-painting is being created under the artistic direction of young people from Bexhill in the pavilion gallery. It's free and it will be on view from 10am to 5pm seven days a week until October 5.

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A party night is planned for next Friday with a live band in the gallery from 6pm to 9pm.

Cartoon masters Grennan and Sperandio plucked a number of teenagers from the streets of Bexhill and invited them to become art directors.

Over a series of collaborative sessions, they were asked to tell the artists about their lives, their priorities and what they thought of living in Bexhill.

Their ideas were then transposed to the huge walls of the gallery as a massive wall painting by Grennan and Sperandio, starring the individuals as they saw themselves.

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Entitled Heaven Can't Wait, the painting is not a representation of "youth today" but gives a strikingly visual voice to a group of individual young people about how they live their lives.

In a parallel project, About Town, a number of other young people were invited to create posters, 500 of which are pasted around Bexhill.

Working in the same collaborative way with Grennan and Sperandio, the posters portray a group of bright, articulate young people with a serious attitude towards living in Bexhill and how they are seen by older generations.

The young art directors (all aged between 13 and 17) are Jenny Poll, William McAuley, Rosalyn Putland, Amanda Saunders, Charlotte Wormley-Healing, Sarah Darker, Luke Bishop, Thomas Remon, Joe Cassar , Bryn Thomas, Nathan Godfrey, Nick Steer, Mark Carpenter and Ka Lok Li.

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Simon Grennan said of Heaven Can't Wait: "We love to work with lots of people and we've had a blast on this project. We really enjoy making wall paintings as well as comic books and films. For the people we work with it's unusual to be in control of 3,200 square feet of wall.

"A big self-contained space is breathtaking to work with. Everyone had vertigo!"

Artists Grennan and Sperandio present other people's stories in their comic-book style to create a blend of public art and digital cartoon artistry.

Well-known in comic book form, but more recently through digital video animation as Kartoon Kings, Grennan and Sperandio transform the stories of friends, relatives and strangers into collections of oddly familiar cartoon narratives. Art-directed by participants, the artists use humour to decipher what motivates others and in the process cross a variety of social boundaries. In remastering everyday events, Grennan and Sperandio manage to fetishize the "normal," and de-mystify artistic processes, bringing a variety of publics into the world of art.

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Since 1995, they have developed comic book and animation projects in conjunction with museums in the US and Europe, with broadcast and web companies and with Fantagraphics Books.

Their interactive projects include "Modern Masters" for PS1/Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with DC Comics, Some Folks for Moss Side and Hulme Regeneration, Invisible City for New York's Public Art Fund, Dirt for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Hand and the Word for the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Ghost on the Stair for artranspennine98 and The Peasant and the Devil for Seattle Art Museum.

Current projects include a ground-breaking audience-development comic book for the Hatton Gallery at the University of Newcastle, a Rootstein Hopkins Fellowship project and a number of animated and live action shows in development for US television broadcast networks. The pair also worked with Chicago chocolate factory workers to design and produce their own chocolate bar as part of the influential Culture in Action exhibition organized by Mary Jane Jacob in Chicago in 1993 and were recently featured in Arthur C. Danto's book After the End of Art.

Mr Grennan and Mr Sperandio tweak our notion of what art is and who it is for."

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Heaven Can't Wait is produced by the De La Warr Pavilion in association with Coastal Currents and Arts Development at Rother District Council

About Town is produced in partnership with Rother District Council's Youth Arts Project, Arts Caf.