Julian Beever knows how to give you vertigo while walking down the street. Check out his surreal chalk pavement drawings and see if you don’t agree. Believe it or not, these do not involve any modifications to the pavement beyond coloring it with chalk. Any sense of depth on the sidewalk itself comes from Julian’s own strange mind. I’ve always been fascinated with street artists. I’ve always seen permanence as being an important incentive for an artist to create. When I write a story or a song, I’m recording something I think is important, and even if I may never be able to quit my day job, that pseudo-immortality is enough to encourage me to continue to create in my spare time. But someone who makes a beautiful chalk drawing knows it’s going to get walked on and rained on and eventually ruined. He knows that, but he still does it. Sure Beever and others can catalog their work with a camera, but past snapshots, they have only memories of their art. It’s a very brave way to create. If you want a bit of insight into the process he goes through, check out the video of him doing his Aveeno Fountain of Youth drawing in New York:
A friend of mine used to do street art, sometimes outdoors and sometimes in a studio. I ran into a street artist today on Twitter with some really cool stuff that reminded me of my friend’s work. My friend has since moved onto other things, which I think is a shame, because some of his stuff was really good. Check out The Me Nobody Knows on his site for some great examples of street art. You can also see some of his stuff on flickr. Here are a couple of things I really like about this artist. 1. His message. From his ebay page, I found this, which I find inspiring as a fellow artist: “To you I may be nobody. Okay, then undeterred and unaffected, I say to you – Nobody did it! (and so can YOU.)” It’s so easy to lose faith in yourself as an artist, to feel that you are just one in a crowded room of many hopefuls. Stuff like this to me is like the desiderata for artists, and I’m feeling better already after just reading it. 2. The thought he puts into his pieces. The picture above that I’m linking, for example, is based on the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp. It makes me wish that every graffiti artist left a description so I could understand why he did what he did and it ought to make you stop and think a little more before you write something off as pure vandalism. And here’s another thought that seeing TMNK’s stuff provoked: street art was the original blog. Now that we have the internet, even with no technical expertise, we can sign up to a blogging site for free and have a small corner of the world where we can share our thoughts with absolutely everyone. We kind of take that for granted. Looking at TMNK’s stuff reminded me that you used to have to fight a lot harder for a space in the public dialog. You used to have to take to the streets with a can of spray paint and risk arrest. You had to believe in yourself enough to take that risk, one which didn’t provide any sort of monetary gain, only the satisfaction of being heard. And, of course, some still do have to do it that way, for whatever reason. Those of us who feel we have a legal voice, let’s be thankful for that and realize how new it actually is for almost anyone (barring those in more repressive areas of the world) to be able to broadcast to the public without fear.