SOUTHWESTERN EYE CANDY

I haven’t exactly been keeping on top of this blog because my life has been way too hectic. What have I been doing you might ask? Well, the first week of December was the end of the semester and I had to schlepp all of my art supplies, papers, books and office goodies back home because it was my last semester there. Next, I had to grade my students’ final projects and turn in their grades. After that, I needed to select work for an exhibit I will have in February at the Print Center in Philadelphia. I needed to get all my ducks in a row (organize, organize, organize) because I was leaving our home in Philadelphia to move to Phoenix. I could only take 3 suitcases of clothing and assorted belongings with me (o.k., I admit they were mostly filled with shoes and handbags).

After arriving in Phoenix and setting up house in a temporary apartment, there were all those chores one must do to buy a house: calls to arrange for insurance policies and loans, calls to set up telephone service, gas, electric, cable, internet service, garbage pick up and pest control (did I mention there are scorpions in Arizona???). In addition to all these tasks, there are still wedding plans for E & M that must be attended to, and, well, I think you get the picture. I am overwhelmed and reeling from it all. It’s a wonder I can function! Am I functioning?

And yet, I have been able to take a lot of photos while exploring my new environment and thought it would be a good way to get back into the swing of things by posting a sampling of them. Here is a little eye candy from the new town I call home. I hope you enjoy the colorful visual stimulation–it is sure a lot more colorful and brighter here than in Philly.

A hummingbird mosaic on a bench at Phoenix Children’s Hospital.

Graffiti to knock your socks off…

A big, red sculpture at The Phoenix Theater/Art Museum…The rules of art are: if you can’t make it good, make it red. And if you can’t make it red, make it big. This is all three: good, red and big! (can you believe that blue sky?!)

Some bicycle graffiti for Rich…

Interior light at The Burton Barr Central Library…it is an amazing architectural wonder filled with light and wide open spaces and a really huge (massively huge) collection of printed matter.

And the obligatory cactus…

More eye candy will be posted on this blog as soon as possible. If you really can’t wait, then go to my Flickr site. I post photos there just about every day.

 

Content and photographs copyright 2007 by Janet Towbin

 

 

 

WHO IS THIS GUY?

I found Green Man on a wall in SoHo this past July.

And Asphalt Man on the streets of Philadelphia just a couple of days ago.

I’ve seen quite a few of these stick figures around, but these are the only photographs I’ve taken. Does anyone know who makes these walking men? I’d sure like to find out. Please e-mail me if you have any information about the artist. If you have an image (or several) of a similar figure and you’d like to share, let me know. I’d love to post them or link up to them. Here are a few I just found on Flickr:
by mrswildmann
by alankin
by Goggla
by damonabnormal

RECENT UPDATE:
Well wouldn’t you know it…there is a whole group on Flickr just for STI(C)KMAN as he is called. So now I know what he is called… And Wooster Collective website has lots of Stikman images from November 2006.

I’ll do a little more sleuthing to see what else I come up with…It seems as though there are two spellings used for him: Sti(c)kman and Stikman. I am not sure which is the preferred spelling, but Wooster Collective uses the Stikman one–so I think that must be correct. Sorry, Flickr group.

The content of this blog including photos is copyright 2007 by Janet Towbin

I HEART STREET ART

Most everyone who knows me knows I love street art. I think it is the most dynamic and energetic art around and it is a constant inspiration to me. Wherever I go, I am on the lookout for wonderful examples of graffiti. I have quite a collection of photographs of street art from all over the world. Of course, most of the images I have taken are those of local Philadelphia steet art and paste-ups–but there are some spectacular shots from travels in Greece, Spain, and of course, New York City, like the one above I took in SoHo last month.

In 1997 I had an epiphany about graffiti in Milan. The city of Milan is filled with architectural and sculptural wonders. It has an abundance of museums, foundations, and churches filled to the brim with important masterpieces. It is incongruous, then, that what impressed me most about Milan was its graffiti. The beautiful, historic buildings were covered with spray-painted vulgarities, messages to lovers, numbers, indecipherable names, and phrases from American pop culture.

At first, the sight of crumbling walls, three or four hundred years old, garbed in twentieth-century spray-paint writing, was shocking. I loathed the graffiti and the vandals who produced it. And then, a strange thing happened. My vision shifted and those graffiti covered walls became incredibly beautiful works of art. They were enigmatic, paradoxical images and I loved them!

The natural colors and textures of the walls—ochres, tans, grays and greens—combined with the graffiti in bright metallic and glossy spray-paint colors were not only impressive, they were outrageous! Another distinctive characteristic of the graffiti in Milan was its layering. The glyphs (or tags, the artists’ signatures) were constantly painted over by the building’s caretakers with small patches of paint that never quite matched the original building material. The layering of marks and depth of under-painting were as impressive as those found in any good abstract painting.

I also enjoyed thinking about the unconscious artistic collaboration taking place between the buildings’ owners and the graffiti artists. The persons who methodically painted over the graffiti to clean it up unwittingly gave the graffiti artist a beautiful surface to work upon—complete with under-painting and a palimpsest of prior markings.  (For some excellent images of graffiti in Milan, check out these photos by Barrybar on Flickr.  They are all outstanding images.)

And now, some 10 years later, I am still enamored of graffiti art. I find some amazing treasures on my city walks and document them with my digital camera. Street art is fresh, gritty and tough; sometimes it is humorous and fun, but mostly street art has a dangerous, subversive and underworld feeling about it. Graffiti is definitely an act of vandalism and rebellion that angers and annoys just about everyone. I admit I like that dark, subversive side of it, the danger and the thrill of tagging right out there on the streets…I suppose I’m a closet anarchist at heart. But I could never actually do graffiti–I can only photograph what I see and then incorporate that in my paintings on paper or canvas.

I cannot stop thinking about how energetic and beautiful street art is, how street art is really the art of NOW–not the work museums or galleries hang on their walls. And it is out there for everyone to see, everywhere on any given day.

There are some wonderful websites to see some really terrific street art. One of the most famous street artists is Bansky from the UK. His work is quite funny and charms everyone with his talent and point of view. Dan Witz is absolutely amazing. He is a New York street artist who studied at Cooper Union. His forte is to paint realistic imagery on areas that have already been tagged giving the wall a trompe l’oeil effect. The Wooster Collective has some great artists and images and stories…For further visual inspiration, there is a great article in Time Magazine Online that you can read called Art of the Street

I hope you have an epiphany!

Content and photos copyright 2007 by Janet Towbin.