The concrete canvas
Watch your step: “Dies Irae”
Click the image to see it much larger.
Ah, the small, guilty yet somehow cherished thrill of walking right across some poor idiot’s chalky sidewalk painting without even noticing. Not so, however, with the creations of Kurt Wenner, Master Street Painter!
The guy’s good, as evidenced by these stunning works photographed around the world and getting a fair slice of attention on the old Net. Even the Pope tried to steal one!
Not kidding. In one of his last coherent acts before his ultimate appointment with his boss, St Peter, John Paul MCXVIII actually signed his own name to Wenner’s huge re-creation in chalk of Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgment”, which the American had spent many, many days scratching out in some courtyard in Mantua, Italy. Imagine the gall of that man, trying to claim it as his own!
Anyway, you can see pix of Wenner’s pavement paintings at his website, many more besides “Dies Irae” (above), which he did in Mantua, Italy, and “Echo and Narcissus” (below), whipped up for the Utah Arts Festival, no doubt to the consternation of many a Mormon.
Heads up: “Echo and Narcissus”.
Click the image to see it much larger.
Wenner, an Ann Arbor native now based in California, travels the world, mostly by invitation, chalking up masterpieces as a form of live street performance, only he doesn’t use chalk at all but durable pastel crayons he makes himself, so the picture doesn’t blow away, see, although it’s still at the mercy of rain, so not much work for him in Bangkok during the monsoon season – not that he’d ever be able to find a flat sidewalk anyway. In fact, those holes he draws in the sidewalk make them look like a lot of Bangkok walkways I know.
He goes for myths and other classical themes, and though he’s been vandalising sidewalks since he was a teenager, you can see where he got his penchant for the far-out when he explains that he worked for NASA, doing those conceptual illustrations of future space projects and extraterrestrial landscapes. Then he boned up on classical sculpture in Italy and began painting with old-fashioned tempera, fresco and oil — and started collecting patrons.
He uses anamorphism, popular in 17th-century Baroque decoration, combining architectural elements with illusionistic painting, and adds to that “a special pictorial geometry that corrects the distortion caused by viewing his monumental images on the pavement from an oblique angle” (I’m quoting his website).
It ain’t just sidewalks he does by any means. He’s got murals on LA’s Wilshire Boulevard and at Fresno City Hall and had a one-man exhibition of his regular paintings at the Kennedy Centre. But it’s the pavement efforts that get all the attention, and they’ve been the subject of documentaries as well as winning a batch of awards.
Wenner says he can paint two to six square yards a day, depending on the complexity of the design and the quality of the pavement, and that he’s “not disappointed when the painting washes away because street painting is performance art, it’s very much like attending a symphony. When the music ends everyone leaves with a memory of the music.”
