iT'S STreeT arT THurSDay! - Thursday, February 12, 2015

Hello Street Art Lovers!

This is an automatic posting. When this goes up I'll probably be somewhere over the Midwest in an airplane on my way back to L.A.

Last week I had posted a very subtle set of paintings made to look like ancient paintings on stone panels. This week, our selections come from Melrose, also done with a very limited palette, but NOT QUITE so subtle.

Artist unattributed, Seeing Red, paint on cement

Here we have an artist who has kept his color choices basically to black and red. When you come upon this building it is very striking because it is so starkly black and slick looking compared to everything else around it.

There are three panels to the art on this building, but they really don't relate to one another, so there's not much point in trying to capture all of them together.

Immediate to the left is this typographical mural.

Artist unattributed, Nicnak Rabet, paint on cement

My guess is that housed within this building is some kind of photographic production studio. There's a fondness for the iconic "eye" of CBS seen here and on the panel to the left.

Artist unattributed, CBS, paint on cement
Sorry about the glare of the son there on the upper right...

This car-oriented panel is on a little portion of wall perpendicular to the facade (the sidewall). You can see how the CBS motif is prominent here.

And here are some detail looks at the major panel Seeing Red.

An old-fashioned, large-format, bellows camera here,




















Here is a red-headed young woman for all of you who want to work on perfecting your practice of the "male gaze." Red rose petals, a symbole of erotic love, breeze by.


And then the detail on the far right, we see the source of the petals, and the source of the banner of film winding its way behind the young woman.

This work, while very flashy in its colors and initial effect, seems still a very immature work. The artist doesn't quite get the woman's body right, even if you try to interpret the distortion to an odd camera angle.

This comes of trying to squeeze into one picture, all of the "best parts" of a woman with no care to accurate anatomy: bare, full breasts, gentle curves of the shoulder blades, long hair, and just enough face to show humanness and young age, but not enough for full identity.

Look at the other woman on the side (the one in the cotton dress with a dark apron, serving up a gramophone). Her hands barely look like hands. Once this artist gets a few more life drawing classes under his belt, things will really pop.

Don't get me wrong, I love this mural. It ALWAYS catches my eye when I drive by. The black is not holding up too well in the bright L.A. sun, but it still striking.

I will be glad to be back in L.A. Hope you've all had a wonderful last few weeks.

Love,
Pops