As I was leaving class tonight my classmate spotted a foil sculpture sitting on the recycling bin. I think it was waiting for a photo shoot, so I obliged.

Here are the much anticipated photos! Let’s call it a twist on found art. I love the juxtaposition of the sculpture in a thinking pose on a pile of recycling.

These are from an empty-lot-turned-community-park in nyc. The murals on the walls change the space from a little creepy to inviting, and inspiring.

One of my favorite parts about cities and urban areas in general is that art seems to growing up and out from the cracks, in the unlikliest of places.

Art in urban spaces is like one massive case study in the age old question: what is art?

Art in cities also exemplifies the nearly unlimited modes of expression. It’s compact, overwhelming, easily missed, impossibly small and implausibly large, at times taken for granted, and somehow still double-take inducing, or just completely awe inspiring. It’s in your face, in your ears, in your mouth, in your head… invasive, but it creates no obstacles.

Here’s part 1 of my NYC observations:

I recently went to Pittsburgh for the first time ever, and saw some really cool community beautification going on.

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store front of a flower shop called “green sinner”

their garden on the side

the welcome to troy hill sign is also a mosaic

in the distance, on the corner opposite where I was when this image was snapped, this neighborhood has scaffolding up and is currently adding a mural to the outside of the building

I was just reading some random click-baity post about a topic I do not remember when something in the text caught my eye: stendhal syndrome. Specifically, I had to stop immediately and look up the syndrome when I read that it’s what they call a particularly strong response to art, in this case, crying.

Have I ever cried over beautiful art? I have definitely had extremely strong responses to art(s) that have launched me head-first into a frenzied creative spell. It’s a kind of amazing experience… but, crying? That I don’t remember. Anger, yes. I felt angry after a particularly powerful performance, once. It wasn’t because the performance angered me due to content or anything, it was because I was jealous-angry. I didn’t feel as creative. I didn’t think I had the right to call myself an artist. I didn’t think I would ever think of a way to create something so hypnotic and powerful to so many people. It was a beautiful night, amazing performance piece, and I still have a couple paintings I promptly went home to paint afterward in a hurried attempt to steal and express some of the energy of their performance vision, but it didn’t work. Those paintings are crap. Oh well.

Anyway, here’s a Psychology Today piece on the syndrome. Have you ever felt this kind of reaction to a work of art?

Psychology Today Art Attack article

A couple weeks ago I received an email from the Tustin Parks and Rec department asking for artists who would be interested in volunteering to paint planters as part of an annual event gearing up for the city’s art walk. Last year I participated in the Plein Air painting competition and won “People’s Choice” for my piece (https://theporch.blog/2017/08/02/commit-invest-deliver-what-to-do-when-youre-in-a-creative-rut/). This year I will be out of town for the art walk and the competition, so I decided the planter painting would be a good way to stay active in my community.

Once I indicated my interest, I received notice that I would be assigned to ZamaTea, a local kombucha and tea shop. I went to the shop to talk to the woman who owns the shop and discuss planter design ideas with her and she told me all about how the original historic building nearly entirely burned to the ground in 2011. It was eventually rebuilt due to its historic significance. I walked away from that discussion thinking about phoenīcēs (I just looked up Phoenix plural form — crazy word!) and how they come back to life from their ashes, so I decided to paint a Phoenix.

So, I’m painting this Phoenix image, and it is timely because of many things happening which are dominating the media air and web waves. In California, there are fires everywhere, but the rest of our country and our world are experiencing losses that are not associated with fires… hurricanes, floods, inhumane acts, it all feels like so much. Too much. Right? But the Phoenix reminds us that beauty and rebirth come from an end, from destruction. That’s just the way things go. Without looking, and without a plan to find hope, I ended up stumbling across a project that is just full of symbolism of hope and creation and rebirth and life and so many wonderful things.

Today I drove through some of the recently burned areas east of Orange, and it made me appreciate that I get to paint pretty regularly and activate a side of my mind that wouldn’t be active if all I had was my life sans art.

And then, as if the universe just wanted to throw me another bone or something, I signed into Pandora radio and the song that started playing automatically started with these lyrics:

“Like the legend of the Phoenix
All ends with beginnings
What keeps the planet spinning (uh)
The force of love beginning
We’ve come too far to give up who we are
So let’s raise the bar and our cups to the stars”

(thanks, Daft Punk and my Pandora “Happy” radio station)

good stuff.

In April I spent 2 weeks visiting family in Cuba. There are many parts of Cuban culture that feel like home, thanks to my upbringing, but some of what I saw and experienced in Cuba is unique to that island.

I recently thought about the basureros or trash piles I saw while I was there. Here is a photo of a dog chowing at one late at night:

That basurero is relatively small. Trash and littering doesn’t have the same treatment, socially, in Cuba as it does here in the states. The best useful translation of basurero I can offer is: place where people in a given barrio dump trash. I saw a dumptruck once in the two weeks I was living in the barrio called Playa.

In another barrio in Marianao, something different has happened. A group of local artists, musicians and random members of the community banded together to clean out a defunct water tank turned basurero which had grown past the old tank and spilled into the streets, taking over a large portion of a block in the neighborhood. The artists took back the community’s space by cleaning it out and turning it into a grassroots art and culture space.

Now they sell local art and work with local tourism groups to bring tourists in from Havana. They play live music, offer local cuisine, and share the history of the space with visitors. It wasn’t until after I had left Cuba and looked through some photos that I noticed that the Snoopy mural was an original Schulz piece, just hanging out in a barrio in Cuba. I love this as an example of art crossing borders, bringing people together, connecting cultures, and leaving a visual trace of the people involved in the evolution of a space over time.

(Above: “Greetings from Snoopy to my friends who have made their dreams a reality in this house of culture.”)

(Above: A collection of irons from the tank cleanout, turned into art.)

(Photos above: Art inthe courtyard pf El Tanque, and art installations on the street in the immediate vicinity of El Tanque)

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an album release party by doing sculpture-themed body art! Many attendees were in crazy costumes, which added to the environment of the event as a whole. Just goes to show you that participating in art enriches both the participant’s and the observer’s experiences, like an infinite feedback loop!