art – Page 3 – Alphabet City Press

9 August 20139 August 2013

Meter Man

I moved to the big city to go to art school, and I made a lifelong friend. We bonded over beer at the local pub and an effort to make our dull drawing class more interesting by wrapping objects and models in great swathes of black plastic. Recently she told me about her idea to collect graffiti characters and turn them into an animated story. She leads a busy life and I don’t know if the idea will be realised, but it’s her birthday today, so I thought she might like this character to get her started.

4 July 20133 July 2013

Confined space

I was amused by this footpath message. There was no obvious sign of ingress to the reputed confined space, so a permit would have made no difference at all. As for danger, well really, how dangerous could it be? They didn’t even spring for red paint! As it turned out, the same stencilled words appeared along the road at regular intervals, and I was just lucky enough to find the hatchless one first, posing as a piece of street art.

19 June 201319 June 2013

Window

I can’t remember if the first time I went to the Bega Cheese factory was on a school excursion or a family road trip, but either way, I seem to have always known, along with everyone else in NSW, about Bega cheese. Once, every drive down the far south coast leg of the Princes Highway involved a visit to the museum and cheese shop, so naturally my recent stay in Cobargo, just up the road, necessitated just such a trip down memory lane. This window, with its painted figures, overlooks the carpark, and although I have never noticed it before it has probably been there forever.

26 May 201326 May 2013

Footpath

My friends and I were daytripping in Barwon Heads on a fine but blustery Sunday. We were full from an excellent lunch of fish and chips, had strolled up and down the main street, indulged in a spot of window shopping and made our token girls-day-out trinket purchase. Then the clouds came over and a sudden burst of heavy rain forced us to take shelter. And right there at our feet, the footpath — previously unobtrusive and unworthy of notice — was transformed by the wash of water into a work of art.

26 April 201326 April 2013

Trees

I’m guessing, but I bet this wall was painted by the cafe/gallery/landscapers on the opposite corner. It certainly improves their outlook. These abstract trees are so Australian in their greyness and grey-greenishness and even the grey-blue background has that hazy too-hot-summer quality. I was tempted to stop for a while just to sit at an outside table and admire the view.

24 March 201324 March 2013

Pizzeria

This pizza man could well be holding up an artist’s palette, but then again, maybe he is! He certainly looks proud enough of his work. Some years ago I worked just around the corner from this Italian restaurant and enjoyed many a good lunch there — brief respite from the awfulness of the job — but I had forgotten about this man. Recently I happened upon him again, pleased to see he is still there. And everyone loves a good pizza, so here, in alphabetical order because there is no other way to rank them, is my top five.

Frankie’s, Mendocino, California
Kings View Cafe, Kapaau, Hawaii
La Disfida, Haberfield, NSW
Pizza Cafe at the Grand, Mildura, NSW
Pizzeria Due, Chicago, Illinois

3 March 20133 March 2013

8132

This reminds me of the work of Jasper Johns, whose use of commercial stencils transformed ordinary and commonplace shapes and symbols into works of art. Jasper Johns is probably most well known for his American flags, but in the 1950s he started using stencilled letters and numbers as the basis for his paintings, prints and drawings. He produced many variations of numbers: single numbers, grid patterns of repeating rows of numbers, superimposed numbers. He was interested in exploring the ways we see and why, and his work has certainly made a difference to my view of the world around me.

28 February 201328 February 2013

Mixed media wall

Here’s another one of those accidental wall works of art I like so much. Age, weathering, layers of worn paint, peeling paint, the splodge of mortar between the sandstone slab and the bricks. And on the left of the pinkish patch there’s some faint pencilled handwriting in the remnants of the plaster. I suspect it’s just some builder’s notes, but I like to think it is something more esoteric, a fleeting message lost in the passage of time.

10 February 20139 February 2013

Keep clear

The bold sweep of white on dark grey and the distressed yellow lettering remind me of some sort of Rauschenberg-Motherwell concoction, if such a thing could exist. It has Rauschenberg’s printmaking-plus-found-object quality, Motherwell’s dynamism and strength. Robert Rauschenberg was known to have inked the wheel of a car and run over paper to create a drawing. As for Robert Motherwell: his body of work, everything from his huge black and white paintings to his small works on paper, is astonishing in its expressiveness and emotional depth.

29 January 201326 January 2013

Good sir

I call this wild-eyed green-haired creature the Good Sir of Goodsir. I think it’s fabulous! It adorns a wall on the corner of Mullens and Goodsir Streets in Rozelle, a wall which even without this illustrative graffiti is a work of art, with its rich textures of layer upon layer of worn paint and the shadow of painted signage underneath it all. I can’t make up my mind if the Good Sir is protecting the corner or alarmed at the threat of being pushed out by the drop shadow: but so far the Good Sir remains, guarding Goodsir.