Blog of the Week: Run Paint Run Run

There haven’t been as many art blogs in the city as you’d perhaps imagine there would be given the amount of students passing through the various university art schools and the wide range of exhibitions and artists studios that you find in Manchester. That’s why I was so pleased to find “Run Paint Run Run”, named after a Captain Beefheart song, it’s written by Ella Wredenfors, an art history graduate, and it modestly defines itself “as a blog about arts, culture and comics in Manchester.”
As with all the best blogs, you can see a personal passion in place; and rather than just being a local “culture show” type thing, it reflects the authors’ interests. So Ella writes about comics – very much an art form – as well as paintings, galleries and the like. Ella’s been busy on the blog recently, and she links to the fine photographs that another blogger, took at the Cornerhouse’s new Darwin-anniversary exhibition “Interspecies.”
Ella, who has recently started looking after Oldham Coliseum’s new media presence blogs about all the things you wish you were seeing, reading or doing yourself but haven’t got round to.
She has a light touch writing about the art exhibitions she visits, saying “I have got drunk in galleries almost as many times as I have visited galleries. It’s not big or clever – but it’s an unacknowledged fact that art exhibitions nearly always go better with a glass of wine on hand” – which nicely punctures any pretentiousness that might be had writing about art; but she’s also got a real enthusiasm for her subject – and, as a regular at the Manchester Social Media Cafe – in blogging about it.
In our culturally rich landscape, it’s hard enough going to all the things that you ought to in the city, and so to find time to blog about them as well, is not just a private enthusiasm, but a public service. Anyone who’s got an interest in the city’s cultural life should bookmark Ella’s blog, another well-deserved “blog of the week,” and a nice arty antidote to the plethora of geek things happening in the city at the moment.
We will be hunting around for blogs or websites to feature here and add to the blogroll as well as in Saturday’s print edition of the MEN so, if you’ve got one to nominate, submit a link to the below. The only criteria is that they have some connection with Manchester.