Tag: art

Art, Sidewalk Faces

The Crap to Beauty Ratio – Why Los Angeles is the Best for Making Sidewalk Faces

by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl1 Comment on The Crap to Beauty Ratio – Why Los Angeles is the Best for Making Sidewalk Faces

IMG_8215

Since writing a recent blog post about making Faces in Other Places, I have been reflecting on how perfect my neighborhood is for this particular activity. Before this analysis I had sort of been patting myself on the back thinking I can do this anywhere. But I must now acknowledge I am blessed to live in a locale that consistently provides the perfect ratio of man made detritus to organic detritus.

It’s very hard to create these faces without trash. How can I make an orange smoke a cigarette if I can’t find a cigarette butt? It’s also hard to make trash attractive. But combine a little crap with a little flora and bingo bango you just might have a new friend. The weather here doesn’t dip below 60 degrees, it never snows and rarely rains. The neighborhood is teeming with a diversity of plant life most of it flowering all year long. Come on! Why isn’t everyone turning roses into faces? To put another cherry on top of this environmental sundae of possibility, I live in a neighborhood full of Spanish style fourplexes from the 1930s. Why is that helpful? Because everyone is renting and no one likely to be around owns or cares about the stuff in their yard. How nice to have orange trees dropping their rotting fruit in apartment complex driveways so I can jam cigarette butts in them without feeling like I am stealing produce. And that red stuff on the end of the cigarette that hopefully makes it look lit up is the droppings of a bottle brush tree. There is so much stuff to choose from. It’s like shopping at a Walmart Supercenter that has a special junkyard section as well as a Botanical Garden in the back. I am free to pluck leaves and seeds and petals without feeling like the petty fauna thief that that I am. Would I have done this to a rose in some well tended rose garden? No! Not only embarrassing but also wrong. This rose was the single flower growing amongst weeds in front of our local post office.

IMG_8050

The final thing that works really well here is the anonimity. Of course there are people around, I’m hardly the only dog walker in the hood. But people in Los Angeles DO NOT CARE. If I was wearing a purple flashing spiderman costume (what? why?!) nobody would pay attention. They would assume, if they even bothered assuming, that I was on my way to Grauman’s Chinese Theater to pose with tourists. I like this because when I am arranging trash in the dirt I don’t want to converse with anyone. I don’t want to explain myself and most importantly I don’t want to stop. I want to get the photo.

IMG_4450

So all in all I am pretty darn lucky to live here. Praise Be.

—

Wormhole to previous blog post:  Faces in Other Places

 

 

Art, Dogs, Sidewalk Faces

Sidewalk Face The Movie

by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl5 Comments on Sidewalk Face The Movie

Sometime last year it occurred to me I could videotape each face just as easily as taking the photo. My camera lets me do that (as does everyone else’s). Since I edit video for a living you would think I might have had this revelation a lot sooner. I didn’t. But I’ve been at it for a while now and here is the first one. Hope you enjoy!

I made the music in garage band with apple loops. Hurray technology. Also, check out my little dogs who are my constant companions. Aren’t they cute?

Art, Sidewalk Faces

Faces in Other Places

by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl1 Comment on Faces in Other Places

Swimming Pool Face Wide_ccSince I started my Sidewalk Face Project a year and half ago I have had the opportunity to make faces in a few locations other than Los Angeles.

Mojave Desert (2x)

Hawaii, Big Island

Texas, Matagorda County

San Francisco, California

If you had to guess, which place inspired the most faces? Do you think I should be able to make good faces anywhere I go? I think I should. But off course I don’t. Let’s investigate.

Hawaii

The worst ratio of faces captured to days available to make them goes to….Hawaii! It should have been the winner just based on the amount of free time I had at my disposal. I was there longer than the other two places by double and I was on vacation so I had nothing else to attend to. Oh, except swimming in the prettiest cerulean blue ocean ever. Could I please die and be reincarnated as a dolphin on the Hawaiian coast? That is what I want out of life.

I didn’t make faces at the beach because I had better things to do but also because the beach doesn’t offer the right ingredients. It has lots of one thing (sand) with only a few other things (shells, seaweed maybe). It could be done, and now that I type this, I am sure my next visit to a beach will force my hand just so I can eat my words, but on the whole, something is missing there that is not missing on my daily dog walks. What is it? Let’s examine my best Hawaiian Faces for a clue.

The first thing that jumps out is nothing is man made. The only unnatural item here is pavement. Four of them were taken in a rural area where we were waiting for a tour.  Nobody was around and I felt free to poke about in the dirt. The tree face was taken on the side of the road as I walked to the beach and the dead centipede face was made at our airbnb. This has me thinking about access. To make these faces I need access to both materials and environment. Do the faces reflect their habitat? I don’t know.

Hawaii Stats

  • 7 Days
  • 6 Good (Posted to Instagram)
  • 8 Mediocre (Unposted)
  • Less than 1 good one a day. Not so hot.

Texas

Now let’s consider Southeast Texas just above the Gulf and south of Houston. I got quite a few good faces in only 3 days. My mom lives in a lovely neighborhood filled with huge live oaks and people moving about in large vehicles. The streets are very clean and the pavement consistently uniform. Unlike my Los Angeles neighborhood where I don’t mind treading briefly on the edges of a neighbor’s lawn to take a photo of a bush, a paving stone or whatever, in Texas l felt too self conscious and maybe even a bit reprobate at the thought of trespassing on someone else’s property. So while there were interesting things I could imagine doing, it was out of my purview. I did spot a dead snake while riding my bike. It was flat as a pancake and a little bloody from being run over in the street. I picked it up with a stick and rode home one handed to get it back to my mom’s driveway for photographing (first one in grid below).  I also found some asphalt chunks discarded after a recent road re-pavement. Otherwise it was just leaves and dirt to work with, which I did.

Things got much more interesting when I crossed the railroad tracks. On the other side of town, there are blocks of houses that form small neighborhoods but they are interspersed with grain silos and other industrial buildings. I found lots of junky stuff in this area that kept me busy for hours such as a pair of rusty faux Chanel sunglasses I paired with a dirty car matt. I also made a face out of some type of grain chaff that was super thick around the edge of a silo. There was absolutely nobody around except for the occasional drive by pickup so I was free to manipulate things without interference.

As I look at the grid above, I see more natural elements than man made ones. Overall it looks wilder than my LA Sidewalk faces but it doesn’t look entirely organic. We aren’t lost in the woods but we aren’t downtown either.

Texas Stats

  • 2 Days
  • 10 Good (Posted to Instagram)
  • 4 Mediocre (Unposted)
  • 5 Good per day. Not bad!

California Desert

I have shot in the desert twice.

The visual themes I notice are rust, sand and abandoned stuff. Out here the stuff left behind isn’t trash it’s the items of domestic life. For some reason this is a place people leave thinking they will return and they don’t. Going picture by picture I shot a charcoal pit, a bathtub, the head of a stuffed animal on some broken concrete, bedsprings, a swimming pool, metal items, netting, coat hangers and an empty pack of marlboros.

The desert is the ideal place to make faces. Nobody is around, no foot traffic, no vehicle traffic. It’s a giant playground of weird crap I am unlikely to find in the city.

Desert Stats

  • 2015 3 Days
    • 4 Good (Posted to Instagram)
    • 19 Mediocre (Unposted)
  • 2016 3 days
    • 9 Good (Posted to Instagram)
    • 0 Mediocre (Unposted)
  • Combined 6 Days
  • 13 Good
  • 19 Mediocre
  • 2-ish per day

San Francisco

Nothing. I took not a single face photo. Not even a bad one. But to be fair I was on a job working almost round the clock.

I think I could go to San Francisco and make something but the stains and trash that caught my eye were not so different from what I might see in LA that they didn’t demand I deal with them. I don’t normally make a face unless I am compelled by a feeling that if I don’t do it right then I will regret it forever. A tad dramatic but still true.

Overall Assessment

I can deduce that two ingredients are necessary for face making: time and ….time.  I was going to write materials but as I think about it that’s not the main problem, only time. The best captures from Texas and the desert were when I was on a walk specifically to indulge this activity and I had given myself several hours to play. I can still remember the feeling of pleasure, like a kid on a very luxurious easter egg hunt.

It’s been illuminating to look at the faces made in each location in a grid. None of them look like Los Angeles faces. In my next post I will discuss materials, geography and why my Los Angeles neighborhood is an ideal location for this particular activity.

The Winner

So the winner by far is Texas! Did anybody see that coming? I bet the Texans did. I think I was most productive in Texas because I had the least amount of other concerns and responsibilities pulling at my attention.