ZAGAR’S MAGIC GARDEN

A week ago Sunday was a perfectly gorgeous day and I was eager to take a long walk with my camera. I was in search of some graffiti and other street art. Instead of finding graffiti I found a enclave of beauty, art and magic. I am still reeling from my discovery and have been left to wonder why it took me so long to find a treasure like this in the city I have lived in for 7 years. I feel like I was the last person in Philadelphia to know about it.

Certainly, I had seen Isaiah Zagar’s mosaics around town and have admired them and photographed them for quite awhile. There are many buildings in Philadelphia covered with Isaiah’s tiles. The Painted Bride on Vine Street between 2nd and 3rd St. is a masterpiece that I have photographed often and never tire of seeing. But let me tell you, finding the Magic Garden and wandering through its labyrinth of tiles, bicycle wheels, pottery shards, bottles, and other decorative ephemera was mind-boggling. Imagine what it would be like to actually walk into a kaleidoscope of sparking colored glass or pirate’s cave encrusted with treasures of incredible wealth. Well, it is better than either of those things…

It is pure magic! It is a wonderland of decorative whimsy. I wanted to stay there as long as possible to soak up joyful dazzle of the place. Such creative good energy! It was tinkling, jingling, buzzing and humming with beauty, peace, love and ecstatic exuberance. Isaiah’s Magic Garden is a delicious dream of what life could be like if we all embraced art, beauty and joy as our natural birthright.

I took over a hundred photos and would like to share just a few of the better ones with you. You can check my Flickr site to see more of the Magic Garden photos. I suggest you look at them in their largest size to get the full impact of the complexity of the mosaics and all the decorative details. Quite honestly, the photos do not give justice to the Magic Garden. You do not get a sense of the complexity and beauty of the place. It really must be experienced to get the full magical impact. If you are planning to visit Philadelphia, make certain you get to see this amazing place. It is only open on weekends, but I think you can call for an appointment. Check out the Magic Garden website for more information.

Content and photos copyright 2007 Janet Towbin.

RUSTED!

The next best thing to finding amazing graffiti or street art is finding a gorgeously rusted dumpster (with or without graffiti). I have seen some of the most inspiring abstract compositions you can possibly imagine on dumpsters. Intricately formed by the living rust organism over time, the rusted-out shapes meld and fuse into one another and form colonies of circular blobs that expand and grow in rings reminiscent of a tree’s inner circles.

The color palettes are stunning and illustrate how nature works her alchemy with these man-made objects! The rust can be any shade of red-orange, yellow-orange or rust-brown. The surrounding painted portions of the dumpster often generate a patina from the rust rivaling oil stains on wet asphalt. The surface color is also manipulated by age, dirt, fading from sunlight, dents and scratches, and of course, graffiti (spray-paint, paste-ups and stickers).

These behemoths of the inner city are metaphors of change—they are present at construction sites—and are repositories (coffins?) of the glory of former buildings and the detritus from reconstruction. All that metaphorical musing aside, dumpsters are treasure-troves of abstract imagery and inspiration.

I thought that I would pay homage to rusted dumpsters (and the ebb and flow of life in the city) with a gallery of dumpster rust photos. There are plenty more dumpster photos on my Flickr site if you want to see more.

Content and photos 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