Know Hope Murals in New York City - Before and After

East Village (March 22, 2012)

Chelsea, 23rd Street (May 24, 2010)

Before and After - Book Page Paintings

Mitosis (left) and Early Man (right) - available in my shop.

This painting on the left is the one that started it all. It was an experiment. I liked the results, so later I came back to this idea. I ripped apart the rest of the book and painted on those pages too. And a whole new series was born. One of my most recent pieces is on the right. Using my initial motif of a cell wall with the nuclei splitting inside some of the contained areas, these small works have come full circle. Back to my scientific roots!

Before and After - Knox Martin on the West Side Highway

I recently discovered a maquette of this piece in a catalog I had sitting around from 1997 of work by Knox Martin. It was entitled simply, Early Work, published by the Janos Gat Gallery located on Madison Avenue (now located on the Bowery). The maquette (pictured below) was originally exhibited by the Jack Gallery (New York) in 1978. The mural itself is located on 19th Street and the West Side Highway on the side of a ten-story facade. It is now virtually obliterated by a modern building giving way to New York's ever-changing real estate development. I'm curious about how the artist feels about this. After walking past it hundreds of times, I finally learned that this piece is called Venus, and was created in 1970-71 on the site which was chosen by the artist specifically for it. 

As it appeared in the late afternoon as the sun was setting (February, 2000)

Maquette from the catalog.

"Traditionally the goddess of love and fertility, Venus represents woman, erotic and supple, but it also conveys Knox Martin's love affair with New York. Venus is his love poem to the city where he has always lived, a place that is part of his being. The feminine, curvilinear shapes of the iamge are in direct contrast with the straight forms that intersect the composition. The overwhelming size of this enormous mural only intensifies the experience of female shapes, the linear aspects of the painted composition, and of the surrounding architecture. In an era when art was reaching out to the masses with pop culture, this huge mural was Knox Martin's way of touch a public that would never venture into an art gallery."

-by Marilyn Kushner (from the catalog)

Giving way to New York's modern age, as it appears now with a new signature.

Before and After - The Blue Wall in Chelsea

There is a certain blue wall outside of the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in Chelsea that gets some special treatment when it comes to street art, and passers-by get treated to an eyeful. The mural featuring two children wearing bird helmets below were on the walls last summer. It was done by Herakut, a collaboration by two artists, Hera and Akut, from Germany. The text reads: “If this was graffiti, we were the chicken.” I don't exactly get what that means- hmmmmm, maybe something was lost in translation. You can see more of their fantastic collaborative art here.  

This summer, the new mural is by Jeff Soto. The blue figure's beard spills out in 3-D onto the sidewalk. The text from the previous piece is still there, as the layers build up. Check out more of Jeff's whimsical artwork here.