At one point or another, most of us have had the pleasure of drawing with chalk either on a sidewalk or in the streets of our neighborhoods. I for one, remember drawing many horrible stick-figure portraits of my family along the sidewalk in front of my house. Who would have guessed that outside of the suburban-like world that I lived in, there would be artists out there creating works of art using chalk and public streets. This form of art is called street painting. Street painters have been around for a long time, some even say as early as the 16th century. Many of these street painters will spend anywhere from a day to weeks working on their drawings and they are always having to work around the weather and pedestrians. Most of these artists make a living on whatever donations they can get while working on one of their pieces. Now, for my favorite street artist, Kurt Wenner:
Kurt Wenner attended Rhode Island School of Design and Art Center College of Design before his career at NASA as an advanced scientific space illustrator. In 1982, Kurt decided to leave NASA to pursue his love of classical art. He began street painting in Rome, Italy in that same year. In 1984, Wenner invented an art form known as anamorphic (3D pavement art). This new geometry invention creates compositions that appear to rise from or fall into the ground. It is based on a form of perspective that is known as anamorphism, which was used by the Europeans to make the illusion of soaring architecture and floating figures in ceiling frescoes. He is the first American artist to win the top prize at the Grazie di Curtatone competition for three years straight. In 1985, due to Wenner’s art, the National Geographic Society filmed a documentary called Masterpieces In Chalk. That fallowing year Kurt started the first street festival in the US that was held at the Old Mission Santa Barbara, California. From that first festival in 1986 to today, street painting has grown rampantly. Currently there are between 50 to 100 street painting festivals in the US each year.
Kurt’s Classical chalk paintings:
Some of Kurt’s chalk paintings that the public can interact with:
Kurt’s chalk paintings used in advertisement:
Here are the sources that I used :
http://kurtwenner.com/