A Mural on SE Water Avenue

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There is a place at 1320 SE Water Avenue called "Tipsee and Spice", which is a bakery of a sort, and on the side facing Water Avenue, they have this mural:

I do recognize RGB: I do not, I am abashed to say, recognize the elegant black woman on the left. Never the less, the mural rocks. 

Murals Over Harvey Milk Street, Part Two

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To view this, you have to go one block east of the last one (3952) on West Burnside and look south on SW 12th Avenue.

 

I'm not sure what the message is supposed to be, but to me it's "Grandma's fallen and she can't get up and also she can't really dress herself and her lower jaw has fallen clean out of her head, so we should probably help her.

I don't clearly know why I identify the figure as a female one. It could be either. 

I adore public art. I just don't pretend to always understand it. With art, I find it's more fun, sometimes, not to 'get it'.

Murals Over Harvey Milk Street, Part One

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The sight line down SW Harvey Milk Street as viewed from West Burnside west of SW 13th Avenue encourage you to fixate upon a surrealism.

I have a feeling Magritte would approve. Also would Luigi Serafini, I think. The pattern that the fellow's shirt is 'decorated' with is a favorite of mine, and I only say that because back when everyone was doing that weird rock'n'roll 'S' on their Pee-Chee's, I was filling the blanks spaces on mine with this.

7 NE Oregon St Part 4: The Worker Must Have Bread, But She Must Also Have Roses

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REturning now to 7 NE Oregon Street, that delightfully-marvellously decorated TriMet service depot building, let's look at that side actually fronting Oregon Street.

It's quite a work of art, in itself.

The real appeal of this art is its graffiti feel, it comes from that marvelously chaotic place where the the militant meets the working class and it's not afraid to show it. The text in the design states where its heart is, in a very clear way: The worker must have bread, but she also must have roses. The art is militant, with more than a hint of feminism and revolution to it, and I like it quite a lot for those reasons. 

There's a lot to see here, and I encourage embiggening the picture and spending a while letting your eyes do the wandering. At the time I took the picture I was kind of walked-out, though, and the Brown Eyed Girl had come through the vaccination line over at the OCC and was waiting on me so I started back. As I'm looking at the picture I'm finding that I wish that I had taken more detail shots. The artists really did a splendid job.

We can always go back.

Downtown Portland: Urban Mural, South Park Blocks

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Yesterday we were fortunate enough to attend the Ursula K. LeGuin tribute at the Schnitz, and we were lucky enough to score a parking spot on the west side of SW Park Avenue about thirty feet north of SW Main St; it was across the park block from the back of the hall.

If you know anything about finding street parking in downtown Portland you know what kind of a lottery ticket that is.

Looking north, on the same side of the street, on the back of the Roosevelt Apartments, we saw this, which is the kind of mural we grow downtown these days. Looks to me like the artist was channelling Codex Seraphinianus. 

 

[art] The Mural Of Surreal Toys

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There is a building I've just heard of here in the anytime-now-to-be-formerly industrial central east side of Portland called Kidd's Toy Museum. It's at the corner of SE Grand Ave and Main Street, and, accessable from Grand just south of Main is a small pocket-parking lot, and in that lot, if you're looking quite quickly, you'll see this:

It's rather beautiful, isn't it? It's like Dali by way of Maurice Sendak via Picasso's 'blue' period. The icy blue monotone makes it all a rather sere dream scene, and seeing as the Kidd's Toy Museum bills itself on Google as exhibiting toys through the first third of the 20th century, it has the feel of a forlorn, yet happy dream. My wife was looking sharp, else we wouldn't have seen it at all, and really wanted the picture, and that much I owed it to her; after all, she'd been sherpaing me around the outer southeast in Sellwood. It was the least I could do.