I snapped this piece of street art at the corner of Keap and Hope streets on the way to the subway a while back. It’s gone now — but I love stuff like this: poppy, sloppy, drippy, heavy-handed. So good …
There were two good things about my apartment in Virginia:
The rent was only $175 a month, and Brad the landlord never came over. Ever. Or so we thought. This seemed ideal at the time, as I was using the living room as a painting space in addition to training live chickens to play keyboards in the living room. The less company, the better.
But like so much else in the world, the good and bad parts of that situation were horribly entangled.
We’d moved into the place in a hurry in the dead of an unusually cold winter – which served to keep the smell down.
But along with spring rains came this smell. This creeping, gnarly smell would wind its funky hand into the house and right into our nostrils like filthy phantom fingers picking up a bowling ball. It reeked of sloth and despair – powerful and pungent and musty all at once, like manure without any of the fertility or any potential.
You’d think you’d drowned it out or think it went away, but it was just always there, a brown undercoating that informed colors and flavors and wormed its way into your freaking dreams. Sometimes a homeless teenaged kid would sleep on our back porch under the window. One rainy morning I heard him say “Oh GOD it smells bad out here.” It happened whenever the air was especially humid, right after a rain, or on foggy mornings.
I was pleasantly surprised by the reactions to Jeff’s previous post about my artstuffs — a belated thanks to everyone who reblogged or contacted me for more info — so I thought I’d share a few pics from my most recent outing.
(More after the jump.)
If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you’ll know that me and David are suckers for brightly-colored comic-themed street art. Particularly if there’s a visual non sequitur involved. Like this poster I saw plastered around the streets of Philadelphia this weekend.
It’s an image of Marvel’s Doctor Doom charging toward the viewer with the phrase “Well, at least things can’t get any worse” superimposed over top in bright pink text …
Pretty much perfect, I think.
Although it contradicts the Simmermon family motto, which I swear I am not lying about. My dad always says
You know, Jeff, we have a saying. “Things go on like this for a while, and then they get worse.”
I saw this in the subway stop by my apartment on Friday night — Poster Boy’s latest, if I’m not mistaken:
Your Monday morning Batman, from the Flickr page of Rosemary Travale:
Rosemary says:
I saw this walking home from the train station after I was at the Speakeasy Illustration show in Toronto. The crosswalk box thing made this shadow on the ground and someone drew a most perfect Batman face on it! I laughed so hard when I saw it. So unexpected and awesome!
Spotted near the corner of Iroquois Shore on Trafalgar road in Oakville Ontario.
(Via Wooster Collective)
You may have noticed D.Billy’s name on a number of posts over the past few months. He’s not only a friend of mine, but a pretty awesome artist.
From the artist’s statement on his website:
Using colorful media such as twisting balloons, party streamers, and artist tape, I have begun to add visual representations of sound effects to public spaces as a sort of dimensional graffiti. After embellishing the found scenes and photographing the results, I leave my additions in place to engage passers-by for as long as the materials hold up. For me, this process encourages a reexamination of surroundings and objects that are usually taken for granted, and injects a hint of the fantastical surreality that I have established in my other work.
Or, at the very least, I hope someone thinks these things are kind of funny.
Here’s some of his work:
More after the jump …
Read the rest of this entry »
In the Northernmost part of Greenpoint, just about as far up as you can go in Brooklyn without falling in Newtown Creek and drifting across the sludge-channel to Queens, there is an ever-changing graffiti mural on the corner of Clay and McGuinness, on the walls of the Power Brake Service shop. We’ve seen employees on site while artists are laying it down, and even saw an NYPD cruiser stop by for a short chat with a tagger before rolling along without so much as a finger-wagging, so we reckon the building owner either approves of the paint job, or at least isn’t bothered by it.
A friend sent this to me a few years back:
I just rediscovered it in the ol’ archives, and man, it never gets old for me.
My friend David William is helping me beef up the NY/Web-based arts coverage here, just to get more content moving through the pipes and be another set of eyes, ears, and opinions on the street. We’ve been friends for a while now, and I’ve loved his art and aesthetic for a long time. Make sure and make him feel welcome, folks, while we monkey with the technicalities of setting him up with his owner user account here.
He writes in here with his first guest post:
Walking past the Taco Bell on 14th street, just West of Union Square, I spotted these two new cut-and-shuffle jobs:
