700 Delaware

Sometime late last year street artist Hense came to DC to work on a former church south of the Capitol area.  The project had some minor controversy over whether this was respectful to the history of this particular site, but nonetheless it's pretty awesome and fun to see up close.

I certainly couldn't sketch this without involving all these great marks and colors, so it took me a little while longer than usual to finish the drawing.  I sketched the basic structure and a little of the surroundings on site, but had to color it at home... after running to the art store for a few more markers...
[You can check out more about the project at Design Boom.]

Not So Much...

So that didn't go quite according to plan.

I suppose I have only myself to blame. I originally had in mind a street art project. Kind of a dipping-my-toes-in-the-water street art project. There is a lot of great architecture in DC, but some of the most interesting building in the city had been demolished years ago to make way for large sterile office buildings. On this part of 9th St. there used to be an amazing strip of buildings, including restaurants, movie theaters, and a burlesque house. I had in mind to make a piece honoring those lost buildings.

While there are lots of street artists I could name for inspiration, the main concept for this piece came from Delta Inc. who had made a wheat-paste street art piece that degraded over time in a semi-controlled way, revealing and becoming a new work in the process.

So I created two layers to my piece. The bottom being an image of what used to be, the top being what is now. The top layer had several purposeful cuts made in it, so that as it weathered, it would fall apart in a way to reveal the bottom layer. It being sort of a reversal of what actually happened, this time the office building is destroyed, returning the strip to the beautiful lost architecture that once was there.

Alas, when I returned to the location a week after putting it up I saw that the piece had been completely removed. Which I should have expected, as that part of Chinatown is kept pretty neat and tidy. I doubt it made it past the Monday after I put it up before it was removed.

I'll have to be more clever about this next time...

Selfportraits in the Rain... after

Maybe the rain didn't fall as hard as I had hoped...

Sunday I picked up the portraits I dropped off Saturday. For the most part the rain didn't leave much of a change, but you could see it in a few of them.

The "stop ahead" sign had the most obvious change, with most of the goauche washed off or dripping down the cardboard.

The mailbox pic got faded a bit.

... and you can see how the cardboard and paint have a changed texture in the phonebooth piece.

Otherwise the rest of them didn't have a very obvious difference.

I'll have to give it another shot sometime, and maybe for more than a night.

the rest of them are in my Flickr somewhere.

Self Portraits in the Rain. Before.

I've placed 10 of these selfportraits around the Capitol Hill/Eastern Market area of DC. I'm only planning on leaving them there for a day, as I want to see how they look after tonight's rain. The cardboard & blue gouache should get changed around a bit from the weather, while the gesso base should show the remains of the facial structure. Hopefully something interesting will happen.

All of my "Pre-Rain" pictures are here in Flickr.