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'.

7 NE Oregon St, Part 3: Transfixed by the abstract

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The other part of 7 NE Oregon I wanted to share today: this visually delectable, entrancing abstract pattern.

Since it only went up in 2019, I understand why it doesn't have the memory-share I thought it should. Also, note the "@LEVELHEADEDPRESS" credit there. 

I don't know if the individual strokes have any meaning as such, but the way they're layered and shaded they capture the eye and draw one in. Such delicate attention to detail is the province of someone truly talented, and I enjoy it muchly, from the almost fractal quality of the patter to the way the deft shading makes it all almost three-dimensional. 

It's a beautiful thing, to be sure. 

7 NE Oregon St, Part 2: The Resistance is Female

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Today I'm revisiting 7 NE Oregon St. I have a few closeups because street art like that is too good not to get close to.

Before I continue, I'd like to mention the credit, which is on the building, is Levelheaded Press. This may be them on the web, but I'm not certain. If it's wrong, I'll come back and change it.

There's more than one story told on the TriMet service building at Interstate and Oregon. This is a potent one:

I had to take this through the fence as I didn't feel confident to walk up to the building facade; it's not exactly public space, after all. 

The resistance is female, though, and after the past few years, I'm here for it.

[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.

[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_art] Art Nouveau M.S. Awareness Mural, NW 6th Avenue, Old Town

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Also seen in Old Town last week during our sojourn there, this mural in an awesome dead-on Art Nouveau style:

This is the first and only time I've ever seen Multiple Sclerosis awareness displayed so gorgeously, and with such style. An artist rubricked Lydia Emily painted it in 2015, and I pay all due respect. It's most lovely.

If you're in Portland, you can see it on NW 6th Avenue at Flanders Street. overlooking the small parking lot on the NE corner.

If you're not in Portland, just look at the photograph.