ART IN WALLS

My first summer in Paris I wanted to paint my own souvenir street scenes to take home and ended up with a lot of atmospheric drawings of French cars, then trucks, signs, walls.

Summers I like to be outside. Often it takes ages to find the right wall to paint, not because there are no nice walls, but because it is a nice day for a walk. Trying to capture the urban landscape through the exemplary or the unusual wall gives me a new way of seeing the city, of traveling, of meeting people, of using many colors.

One day in New York a policeman leaped out of a cruiser with an exacto knife and destroyed the box which I had been using as a backrest. “God damn three card monte!” he exclaimed —”You never win!” I sat on the remains.

Watercolors travel well, trapping dirt and soot only until the paint is dry, allowing me to sit in very grubby places. They lend themselves to wall paintings almost organically, washing like the rain, dripping like a stain, spreading like graffiti, and painting like paint over everything but a skinny edge of light. Perfect for meticulous realistic posters and wild abstract washes of color, they are also easy to put away quickly in times of need, for instance when the small wobbly man with the large machete wanted dollars.

In museums, people bolt suddenly between you and the statue, so as not to get into the picture. On the street they stand square in front, mystified, saying, “what are you, painting?” — then they strike a pose, “do you do portraits?”

Some guy peed on the Marky Mark underwear ad.

One boy scoffed “Aw, that’s easy, you just stick the sticker on.”

A woman who looked like a housewife said “Can’t you draw a picture like it’s New York and blew up with everybody in it?”

As I painted the exact Chinese characters, a woman bent over with happy tears in her eyes and asked, in very broken English, “You study Chinese?”

An unknown man grabbed my bumblebee jar lid and flung it into an empty lot.

It is nice to see a place you know in a movie, or to recognize the person in a portrait: this is why I wanted to show these pictures here where I painted them.

Wendy Artin
November 26, 1996