Urban art brushes back vandalism

Savvy businesses employ talented graffiti specialists to block untidy tagging 

 

This building was painted with permission by several graffiti artists during the Hopscotch Festival earlier this. Tags used to cover the building, but not anymore.

 

AN ANGRY CARTOON SUN glares at pedestrians walking past Nauss Bike Shop on Agricola Street. Nearly illegible bubble letters claim an entire exterior wall. A desert landscape runs along the bottom. Thought has been given to filling the entire space with graffiti-style art.
For years, taggers targeted Nauss, costing the small business hundreds of dollars a year in paint to cover it up.

“We weren’t getting artists writing on our shop — we were getting kids who were making a mess,” Nauss manager Brent Halverson says. “You clean it off and it just gets tagged again.”
It became obvious to the long-time bike shop employee that a new strategy was needed.

Over the summer, Halverson put the call out to six local graffiti artists (also known as graffiti writers) to paint murals on the bike shop.

“I knew that it would at least be an improvement to cover it up with something more colourful, more attractive, and hopefully get locals artists and the community involved in the project.”
He pitched the project to the shop owner, who didn’t like the idea at first, but eventually came around.

Nauss hasn’t been tagged since the murals went up.
The shop is one of several small businesses on the Halifax peninsula that are using an unwritten code to their advantage.
In general, graffiti writers across North America follow a series of unwritten rules. They don’t tag houses, religious structures, memorials or tombstones. And they won’t tag over another tag. It’s called “crossing out,” and it’s considered disrespectful.

Following that logic, graffiti artists won’t paint over a mural unless they can improve on what was there before.
There’s also a rule that writers should respect mom and pop businesses, Halverson adds. But not everyone does.

After the Nauss murals went up, an unsolicited fat-lettered tag known as a “throw up” appeared on the bakery next door.

Murals can prevent tagging, but they may also attract attention to a space, giving the impression that graffiti is welcome on blank surfaces nearby. Nothing is guaranteed.

Just over a year ago, George Kapsalis, owner of the Paper Chase Newsstand and Cafe on Blowers Street, tried the same strategy as Halverson, with mixed results.

For as long as Kapsalis can remember, one wall of his cafe, located in an alley, has been a tag magnet. Pressure washing the wall didn’t help.

The tags always came back.

So when a young graffiti artist approached Kapsalis with a portfolio of his work, the owner decided to give him a shot. The artist painted a series of graffiti-style murals on the wall. Kapsalis paid for his materials and gave him “a little something for his trouble.”

“Instead of somebody doing it that I have no control over, at least I’ll allow someone that has some type of artistic value to put something there that might dissuade other people from tagging it,” the cafe owner says.
“Doing something like that is not going to stop everybody from tagging — people who have no sense of honour or code or whatever. But I weighed it out and thought that was my best option.

“There’s some kind of code. I don’t really know. But so far, so good, you know?”

His business partner and wife isn’t so quick to agree. She points to a tag on the wall at the end of the alley. “This is new,” she says.

The artist left empty space above and below the murals. The new tag appeared in the empty space below. Still, one tag in one year is certainly an improvement.

According to one local graffiti writer, people will tag any empty space. He didn’t want his name or alias used, so we’ll call him John.

“Clean surfaces invite tags,” John says. “Had the mural filled the space fully, it is less likely that third party tags would appear there.”

“Writers by and large respect murals. To tag a mural is a sign of disrespect within the writers circle and rarely happens.”

Another local graffiti artist — one of those who painted Nauss — concurs with John. He didn’t want his name used, but his alias is Bike More.

“There is a good chance that the mural won't get touched, but that still leaves the rest of the building open,” Bike More says.

“If the space is not entirely filled, it will be,” he adds. “If a business commissions or grants permission, it is wise to ensure that all of the negative space is filled. This is even true for graffiti writers practicing on legal walls. If you do not ‘take out the spot,’ it will catch tags.”

The unwritten rules in the subculture stem from the New York City graffiti scene in the 1970s and 1980s, which was popularized by movies like Wild Style and documentaries like Style Wars, John explains. “The rules are somewhat outlined in those films and still remain gospel for the most part,” he says. Both artists emphasize no graffiti rules are universal, however.

“Tagging can never be stopped completely as long as humans are being taught the written word,” John says. “But maybe society can impact the nature of the output through tolerance rather than opposition.”

Halverson gave Bike More and his friends the freedom to paint what they wanted as long as they did it well. Down the road, the Nauss manager hopes to build removable plywood panels on the exterior of the building so artists can paint murals and later sell their work.

The idea of businesses commissioning or permitting murals in order to prevent tagging resonates with John and Bike More.

“A good way to help establish respect is by allowing people to paint (a wall) as they want, setting rules such as ‘if you tag my building, the wall will be taken away from you’ or something similar,” Bike More says. “It is all about working together here.”

“I feel like it's beneficial to all,” John says. “For the business owner, it allows their business to become a landmark and visually unique. For the artist, it showcases their abilities and legitimizes their credibility as an artist. For the community, it brings character to the area and facilitates acceptance and appreciation of public art.”

Tattoos form missing ink between dying art and the art of dyeing

Time lines … Lauren Winzer and her handwritten tattoos. Photo: Tamara Dean

IS HANDWRITING set to ''vanish from our lives altogether?'' Are emails and texts robbing us of ''the most powerful sign of our individuality?'' So asks Philip Hensher, author of the new book The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting.

But Lauren Winzer would beg to differ. A tattoo artist with Sydney's Hunter and Fox, she says a growing number of people over the past year have requested their loved ones' handwriting be permanently marked on their bodies.

''It's definitely more popular, it's always something meaningful that they want to get tattooed in handwriting,'' Winzer says. For instance, she has had mothers request their own names, as written by their kindergarten-aged children, be inked on them.

Pure appeal ... handwritten tattoos by children and friends are all the rage.

''And two weeks ago, a guy came in; his friends know him specifically for having really horrible handwriting. He drew the stencil of the phrase, 'I've had a gutful' … in his own handwriting, and I just traced on top of it. It's [the writing] shocking. There's two 'a's in there, and they're completely different from each other. He was like, 'This is kind of what I'm known for; I'm going to kind of embrace it.''

 

The chief executive of Bondi Ink, Wendy Tadrosse, has witnessed the same trend. She says, in the case of children's handwritten tattoos it is the ''purity'' inherent in the frequently wonky scrawls that account for their appeal. ''You just look at it and … 'Yeah, that's just pure. It's just innocence'.''

Tadrosse has also had several sailors recently come in to have love letters written decades ago by their grandmothers, to their grandfathers, tattooed on their ribs.

Personal touch ... a man known among his friends for his terrible handwriting decided to have it tattoed on him.

''They've had their grandparents pass away, and it's love quotes and sonnets and things like that,'' she says. ''I would never think to do something like that. Usually you'd have a symbol of the grandmother, not actually her handwriting.''

According to Winzer, these tattoos do, indeed, fulfil what Hensher says is one of the most meaningful functions of handwriting - to show how ''distinctively human'' we are.

As an example, she gives the two tattoos she has of her best friend JJ's handwriting; the phrases ''Sick as hell'' and ''Pretty wise'' - which are inside jokes - on the front of her ankles.

''Because it's a boy's handwriting, it's just overly shitty looking. I think it's kind of harder for boys to write, so when they actually put the effort to try and write something out, it's kind of cute.''

Art: Wealth of works, all by women

The Alter collection - 500 pieces - debuts at the Academy of the Fine Arts.

"Sea Shells, Gold Fish and Rain" (1993), oil on canvas by Janet Fish. It mixes still life and landscape. 
Linda Lee Alter's collection of art by women, 25 years in the making, makes its public debut at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the title "The Female Gaze." 

At the entrance to the show, visitors are greeted by a monumental ceramic "grandmother" figure by Viola Frey that unequivocally announces not only that one has entered the domain of female art, but that this art easily holds its own with any other. As one quickly comes to realize, the "gaze" in question refers not only to women expressing how they experience daily life and the world, it embodies the intelligence that shaped the collection.
Alter isn't an art historian or exclusively a connoisseur; she's also an artist. Yet her vision goes beyond even a female artist's perspective.

The nearly 500 works in a variety of media, which she gave to the academy two years ago, incorporate an emphatically humanist point of view.

Aesthetic judgments played a role in her acquisitions, but the unifying thread is a concern for how people, especially women, get on in life. This, not just the desire to give female artists more visibility, is what gives her collection special appeal.

Curator Robert Cozzolino had the not-so-enviable task of figuring out how to shape this mass of art into a workable show. The collection itself offered only one hint: It's mostly representational, strong on narration and symbolism. Abstraction isn't much of a presence.

It isn't a collection of stunning masterpieces, either, though overall quality is consistently high. Judging by the catalog, which includes all 185 artists Alter acquired, the art that was left out would have made an equally satisfying show.

Cozzolino decided to organize the 244 works into three sections - Selfhood and Community, Politics, and Nature and Ecology. The first could easily be two categories, while the other two are broadly elastic.
Nevertheless, they serve the intended purpose, to impose structure and make the show comfortable to navigate. Alter began to collect about 1985, by which time the feminist movement had proved the argument that female artists were woefully underrepresented in museums and galleries and in the art market.

She says she was guided by several principles - to form a collection she eventually would place in a museum, to buy art she wanted to live with, and to patronize artists in the Philadelphia region as well as those known nationally.

She also decided to concentrate on the last four decades, which gives the exhibition a contemporary flavor.
Both the show and the catalog suggest that over 25 years she bought art by just about every prominent woman who exhibited solo in Philadelphia. Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of anyone she missed.
While local artists are strongly represented, there are enough national figures to preclude provincialism. Besides Frey, they include Louise Bourgeois, Joan Brown, Kiki Smith, Gladys Nilsson, Alice Neel, Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, Beatrice Wood, and Faith Ringgold.

The collection's humanist dimension emerges in several ways. One is the generous percentage of minority artists, especially African Americans and Asian Americans. Another is the large number of works that address motherhood and female self-image, particularly nudes and self-portraits.

Two examples: As a declaration of pride and self-assurance, Diane Edison's semi-nude self-portrait is the most assertive, even combative, image of its kind I've ever encountered. And Neel's full-body nude portrait of a pregnant friend, Claudia Bach, posed as an odalisque, defines a genre no male painter could hope to equal, even in the unlikely event one was drawn to the subject and brave enough to attempt it.

Alter's collection oozes empathy both for female artists and for women's lives. It gives the expected attention to traditional "women's media," particularly fiber art, in just the right proportion.

In fiber, Alter chose examples - such as Ringgold's painted story quilt and Shapiro's collage image of a dress - that combine fabric and painted elements in a way that de-stigmatizes the dominant medium.

Yet the collection doesn't go overboard on explicitly feminist polemics, with two prominent exceptions: a plate from Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and Elaine Reichek's embroidered sampler that caustically decries female "bondage" dating back to Adam and Eve.

The Nature and Ecology section is perhaps the most amorphous of the three themes and also the least manifestly "female."

It includes landscapes and still lifes, and an effusively colored painting by Janet Fish that mixes both. An exquisitely detailed pencil drawing of trees by Emily Brown and another of coastal rocks by Edna Andrade, both of which represent intense scrutiny of nature, also stand out as exemplars of female sensibility.

The Alter gift has been integrated into the academy's full collection, not segregated as an autonomous entity; some pieces from it will always be on view, the museum says.

This approach is not only sensible, it responds constructively to the nagging question of whether regarding "art by women" as a genre has become a patronizing anachronism.

Female artists haven't yet achieved full parity with men, in museums or in the marketplace, and, as the Alter gift demonstrates, art by women does deal with themes that men avoid. Yet the gift also confirms that, in aesthetic terms, female artists no longer should be judged by a standard peculiar to them.

Keepsakes await at Berea's Velvet Box Art Glass Studio

One of the Jennifer Pitts' creations that has won several awards.

BEREA - The Velvet Box Art Glass Studio in Berea came by its name quite viably.

"I wanted to create jewelry that you don’t hang on a bathroom door, but pieces that you keep to pass on to your children and grandchildren. I want the purchaser to keep them in a velvet box."

Jennifer and John Pitts own the hidden gem that is tucked in with industrial-looking buildings on West Bagley Road. The studio, located at 794 W. Bagley Road, has a mini-open house from 3-9 p.m. Dec. 7. The studio will offer a "buy two, get one free" bead special at the event.

The two create sparkling and unusual European "add-a-bead" glass beads that can be worn on bracelets and necklaces as well as specially made sculptured glass jewelry. The gallery also has artwork from local photographers, sculptors, potters and blacksmiths.

Jennifer makes beads that will fit any type of bracelet or necklace. Some the designs have raised swirls and sculptured beads. Her Tree of Life piece is a wearable glass sculpture with a highly detailed, multi-dimensional tree.

"The raised swirl design is technically very challenging. It changes the way light hits the glass and really shows off your bracelet," she said. "We also have silver inside our beads. They are truly different."

John is the silversmith. He places a solid sterling silver core in the beads. He also does fused glass work, which is done in a very strong flame. He cools and then heats layers of glass, which fuse together creating distinctive patterns.

"He hand paints designs on them, which almost no one does," Jennifer said. "He then coats them with a clear covering. They are extremely durable."

Some of John’s favorite hand-painted pieces include a light house and windmill.

These are some of the handmade beads available at the studio.

 An out-of-the-ordinary creation they offer is the memory gem. The glasswork mingles ashes from a loved one or pet into a molten-glass design. Jennifer created the first piece after her father died. She avoided the original vial that contained his ashes. As she was creating some glasswork, she thought of what her father would tell her when they looked at the sky years ago.

"The brightest stars in the sky were loved ones we lost watching over us," she said. "I created a heart as dark as the night sky with thousands of glittering silver stars and gorgeous aurora borealis streaks. Into those layers I incorporated Dad’s ashes and a diamond he gave Mom. When I wear it, I feel him close to my heart and I know he’s there watching over me."

The studio also offers classes for individuals and groups. The Glass Experience class includes an instructor, a torch that anyone can use during the class, refreshments and appetizers — giving you a first-hand experience working with glass. Other classes are available, or customers can rent a torch during the day.

Store hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Friday. It is open on weekends when the couple is not at an art show. Sundays are by appointments.

Harper art heart of Todd Oldham book

This image is from designer Todd Oldham's new book, 'Charley Harper's Animal Kingdom' (Ammo Books, $100). / Provided 

When the famed designer Todd Oldham published “Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life” in 2007, he created an international interest that continues to grow for the late Cincinnati nature-oriented artist/illustrator. In fact, helped by that book’s success, Harper artwork and products have become a million-dollar business.

The book helped new generations recognize Harper as a visionary midcentury modernist, because of the stylized, uncluttered, colorful and geometric-shaped precision of his work. This happened at a fortuitous time, just as modernist art, design and architecture was being rediscovered.

Oldham, a Texan whose studio is in New York City, will be in Cincinnati Saturday to introduce and sign copies of his brand-new publication, “Charley Harper’s Animal Kingdom,” at Cincinnati Art Museum and Joseph-Beth Booksellers.

Like the trend-setting first book, this is a large-size monograph. The images have largely been unseen or little seen by the general public, drawn from the Charley Harper Art Studio archives in Cincinnati or from collectors of Harper paintings.

Animal Kingdom, which has more than 300 reproductions of artwork, differs from “An Illustrated Life” in an important way. It assumes the readership is now familiar enough with Harper to not need much introduction into his life and background. Other than a short foreword by Oldham, it lets the illustrations speak for themselves.

In conjunction, the art studio, run by son Brett Harper, is releasing a related, limited-edition portfolio of four prints. “This is really Charley as an art star,” Oldham said in a phone interview of the new book.

“When we did the first book, he was very much an art star to me, but a lot of the world wasn’t familiar with his name at that point. That book showed his process and a lot of other things. This book just shows Charley as an art star.”

Oldham, 51, has designed successful fashion, furniture and accessories lines for major corporations as well as working on hotels and nightclubs. He became a Harper fan as a child, seeing his illustrations for 1961’s “Giant Golden Book of Biology.”

He met Harper after coming here in 2002, and developed a friendship and working relationship that lasted until Harper’s death in 2007 at age 84.

Working on the first book, Oldham got to know Harper, his late artist/wife Edie and Brett. And he knew animals would be a perfect theme for a follow-up publication.

“It was fun to be at dinner with them, hear a bird call, and have them examine it for good chunk of time to determine what bird it was,” he recalled. In those last years, Oldham became a veritable family member.
Charley Harper Art Studio has licensed Oldham to contract with companies to produce Harper-related design objects. Next year, Designtex will produce Harper textiles and wall coverings, Birch Organic Fabrics will make cotton fabrics for quilts, and Gold Leaf Design Group will offer 3-D figurines.

Review: Lee's 'Life of Pi' is inspiring 3-D art

This film image released by 20th Century Fox shows Suraj Sharma as Pi Patel in a scene from "Life of Pi."

"Life of Pi" is one of those lyrical, internalized novels that should have no business working on the screen. Quite possibly, it wouldn't have worked if anyone but Ang Lee had adapted it.

The filmmaker who turned martial arts into a poetic blockbuster for Western audiences with "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and made gay cowboys mainstream fare with "Brokeback Mountain" has crafted one of the finest entries in his eclectic resume in "Life of Pi," a gorgeous, ruminative film that is soulfully, provocatively entertaining.

Lee combines a lifetime of storytelling finesse with arguably the most artful use of digital 3-D technology yet seen to bring to life Yann Martel's saga of an Indian youth lost at sea with a ravenous Bengal tiger aboard his small lifeboat. It's a delicate narrative with visceral impact, told with an innovative style that's beguiling to watch and a philosophical voice that compassionately explores how and why we tell stories.

Our playful, not-always-reliable narrator here is Pi Patel, played by newcomer Suraj Sharma as a teen and as a grown man reflecting back on his adventure by Irrfan Khan. As a youth, Pi, his parents and brother set out from India, where the family runs a zoo in a botanical garden, to Canada. Pi's father brings along some of his menagerie on their voyage, including a tiger named Richard Parker with which Pi had a terrifying encounter as a boy.

Their ship sinks in a storm, with Pi the only human survivor aboard a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg and Richard Parker. Survival of the fittest thins their numbers into a life-and-death duel, and eventually an uneasy truce of companionship, between Richard Parker and Pi.

This could be a one-note story — please Mister Tiger, don't eat me. Yet Lee and screenwriter David Magee find rich and clever ways to translate even Pi's stillest moments, the film unfolding through intricate flashbacks, whimsical voice-overs, harrowing sea hazards and exquisite flashes of fantasy and hallucination.
Lee used real tigers for a handful of scenes, but Richard Parker mostly is a digital creation, a remarkably realistic piece of computer animation seamlessly blended into the live action. The digital detail may be responsible for most of Richard Parker's fearful presence, though no small part of the tiger's impact is due to the nimble engagement of Sharma with a predator that wasn't actually there during production, a task hard enough for experienced performers, let alone a youth with no acting experience.

Digital 3-D usually is an unnecessary distraction not worth the extra admission price. In "Life of Pi," like Martin Scorsese's "Hugo," the 3-D images are tantalizing and immersive, pulling viewers deeper into Pi's world so that the illusion of depth becomes essential to the story.

Not all of the images live up to Lee's digital tiger or 3-D wizardry. Water is notoriously hard to simulate through computer animation, and the waves crashing down around the sinking ship or tossing Pi's lifeboat about have an unfinished, cartoony look. Still, Lee more than compensates with a world of visual wonders, from the simple image of a swimmer framed from below as though he's stroking his way across the sky to a mysterious island populated by a seemingly infinite number of meerkats.

The rest of the cast is mostly inconsequential, including Gerard Depardieu in a fleeting role as a cruel ship's cook. The other people in Pi's life are filtered through this unusual youth's eyes, each of them catalysts in the development of his deep spirituality, which blends Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and other contradictory influences into a weirdly cohesive form of humanism.

Like Martel's novel, the film disdains our inclination to anthropomorphize wild animals by ascribing human traits to them, and then turns around and subtly does just that. Friendship cannot possibly exist between a hungry tiger and a scrawny kid alone on the open water, yet for that boy, if not the cat, the need for togetherness, some commune of spirits, is almost as strong as the need for food and water. The ways in which Lee examines the strange bond between Pi and Richard Parker are wondrous, hilarious, unnerving, sometimes joyous, often melancholy.

Pi's story may not, as one character states, make you believe in God. But you may leave the theater more open to the possibilities of higher things in the life of Pi, and in your own.

"Life of Pi," a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG for emotional thematic content throughout, and some scary action sequences and peril. Running time: 126 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

Smithsonian gathers best art of Civil War era

This undated handout image provided by the Smithsonian American Art Museum shows Frederic Edwin Church's 1861 oil on paper, "Our Banner in the Sky," part of a major exhibition on how artists represented the Civil War and how the war changed art. The piece is on view in Washington now through April and then moves to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Paintings and photographs depicting the raw reality of the Civil War marked a major change in American art that tossed out romantic notions of war.

Some of the finest artists of the day, including Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Frederic Church and Sanford Gifford, painted landscapes and scenes of everyday life to show how the war transformed the nation. Their best works, along with some of the first photographs of soldiers killed on the battlefield, have been gathered by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for a major exhibition on how artists represented the war and how the war changed art. “The Civil War and American Art” is on view in Washington through April and then moves to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey spent years researching the project and borrowing many of the 75 works featured in the show. It features Civil War scenes from Washington, Baltimore, New York, and points south at Fort Sumter, Charleston, S.C., Georgia and Virginia.

Rather than make portraits of war generals and heroes, however, artists of the day focused on the common man. There was a realization that “art that presents normal human beings, rather than celebrities and luminaries, carries more lasting weight.”

One painting in the show, Gifford’s 1862 painting “Preaching to the Troops,” depicting a scene near Washington, was displayed in the Oval Office for 13 years.

Photographs had perhaps the greatest impact on art of the era. Battlefield photographs by Alexander Gardner showing piles of dead soldiers and images by George Barnard showing Charleston in ruins destroyed any romantic notions of war being a heroic adventure. Such images were shown in art galleries in the Northeast during the war and made people realize “this is not what I signed up for,” Harvey said.

“Photographs from Antietam make it stunningly impossible for anyone associated with the New York art world to make romantic pictures of the war because they look like lies,” Harvey said.

Art also changed the rhetoric about war by depicting gruesome reality. Raw imagery shown to President Abraham Lincoln likely influenced the words he drafted for his Gettysburg Address, Harvey said.

“There’s a realization that this is a war that left nobody unscathed,” she said. “As a result, as rich as you are, there is no insulation from the impact of the war.”

Landscape paintings reflected the mood of the nation. Artists depicted scenes of nature and weather to represent the war’s destruction and impact. There are layers of coding in such paintings, Harvey said, as with Church’s depiction of ice as Northern fortitude, an erupting volcano to represent slavery and the tropics to represent the South.

At the same time, Homer and Johnson addressed slavery and emancipation with scenes of ordinary people, including a slave family escaping to freedom on horseback and a slave man reading from the Bible.

In postwar America, Homer painted a scene of former slaves meeting with their former mistress, renegotiating their relationship to involve wages. “Homer is saying, ‘until this gets fixed, we’re not done,’” Harvey said.