Another Aged Directional Sign In The Lloyd District

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This picture serves as a reverse angle from the previous one's. 

I mentioned then that State Hwy 99E runs up and down Portland's east side out loud while 99W does it under cover. The previous episode shows directions to the southbound leg of the MLK/Grand couplet. Perforce, this one points you down the northbound leg ...

 ... which is NE Grand Avenue. 

The thing that I really cogged on, noting the obvious weathering of this sign, is that approximately the same weathering is adorning he signs over NE Oregon Street that I captured in the picture in this posting. The new Lloyd District has just about covered the old one over, but there are echoes of what it once was, like old cord, tying the area together, all of a piece. A diffuse one, perhaps, but a piece never the less.

[pdx_art] Murals Overlooking Beautiful SE Grand Avenue

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Whilst we were at the legendary Andy & Bax, finding a replacement messenger bag for the one I had that was wearing out (yes, I am a bearded man in Portland who carries his diary around in a shoulder bag, thanks for acknowledging that I fulfill the stereotype) I noticed, going in and going out, a couple of murals that I hadn't seen before. After finally settling on a properly effete and artistely poserly bag (the Rothco M-51 engineer's field bag, there, ya happy now, you judgemental bastards?) me and Wife™ returned to the car but since I was in dilettante art-blogger mode all of a sudden, I had to get some pictures, aren't I the nice one?

Anyway. Ahem.

These two beauties are on property looking out on SE Grand Avenue between SE Ash and SE Pine Streets. The first one caught my eye because it was kind of aggressive, the other, because it was soft and evocative.

Party of the first part:

The text reads NOTHING GOOD COMES EASY, and the legend is kind of its own indictment, because the good thing that doesn't come easy is an angle on that painting. Right, out of frame, the roofline belongs to a building that comes out all the way to the sidewalk on the east side of Grand, and obscures any sort of decent, direct view of it from there; another place it cannot be seen from is across Grand from there, and Grand is pretty wide for a Portland street, so at this point, I'm thinking that Olga Volo and Zach Yarrington, the attributed artists, while passionate about doing this painting, weren't too keen on actually having people see it, which actually kind of fits, because that's as Portland passive-aggressive as you can get.

I love the mural you guys, but I got a shot of it; I bested you. I won your little game.

The other one, much more accessible, was in the parking lot immediately north of that.

This one is so sweet and moody that it pretty much took the steam out of the bad attitude I worked up going up against the other creation there. If it references something, I'm not yet sure; but it's got a mixture of moody, melancholy, and calm going on that's quite seductive and appealing.

The artist is credited as Jade Rivera, and I fell in love with the painterly maker's mark, seen left in the small graphic, located in the upper left corner of the building's wall.

I enjoyed the chase and got a little bit of walking into my out-of-shape frame, which is kind of a bonus. But me and that other mural ... we're still gonna have words at some point. 

[pdx] Photos On Sunday: Inversion Plus/Minus

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In Portland, Oregon, you tend to get spoiled, visually. Public art is so easy to come by you begin to tune it into the background. A lovely, texturally rich background, but a background never the less, and backgrounds tend to get taken for granted.

I'm somewhat fond of abstract art so, a couple of years back, when strange lattice-like confections of reddish steel started going up at the corners of SE Grand Avenue and Belmont Street and SE Grand Avenue and Hawthorne Blvd, then, I kind of disregarded them. They were interesting, but not compelling. Just another interesting excursion into outdoor art, and in a city that just looks great even when it just tumbled out of bed, nothing all that remarkable.

Or, as I assumed.

This, as they say, is my bad. Since I've been working out with my camera so much lately, I've put more effort into not only looking, but seeing. A side effect of all this deep examination is that you begin to see things in a glance that you didn't notice in a long gaze.

The sculpture, parts one and two of which are eight Portland city blocks apart, are called Inversion: Plus/Minus. It's courtesy Annie Han and Daniel Mihaylo, of Seattle's Lead Pencil Studio, and honors the idea that buildings were once in those spaces … they're ghost buildings really. The south wing, at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge, is more obviously referencing the idea of a building … it has an obvious shape and connectivity.

It was the north wing that had me going for so long. As we were heading to the Dutch Bros at Grand and Belmont for that sweet, sweet free birthday coffee (there is nothing in the world that is wrong with this, by the way), I look up out the front window of the car, look down the street, and see …

… the negative space underneath the steel lattice. It's a pitched roof, as clear as anything. And I had never bothered to notice before.

Again, as I say, my bad.

The area on the east side of the Willamette, as anyone who travels down Grand and MLK might tell you, seems to be a ghost of a big town that could have been, or should have been. It's still rather disheveled, which is good … too much of Portland has been polished to a blinding gleam. At SE Yamhill and Grand is a four-story skyscraper-styled building which has, for as long as I've known, been a home for a beauty-supply house. The Arcoa Building, it's called. We parked aside of it and I got out and snapped some shots of this thing I've finally figured out.

Near by to this and across the street is a spire called The Weatherly Building. 12 floors tall, it's the undisputed king of the eastside strip. No other eastside building is taller, at least not south of the Banfield. And looking at it, I get the idea that the hoped it would be one of many.

But then, Portland had not yet really become Portland, not yet, anyway.

The illusion shatters, but in slow motion, as you pull aside of it

It was quite an experience, that frisson of recognition I got when I finally looked and saw. I don't think I could handle more than twenty or thirty of them in a day. 

I hereby resolve to take no more outdoor art in Portland for granted. 

Promise.