Street Painting at the Arts Festival
July 9, 2009 at 12:50 pm Tina Hay 3 comments
I took a walk down to Hiester Street late this morning to take a look at the Italian Street Painting project, which has been a part of the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts since 1999 and which I have somehow never managed to check out. I figured it was about time.
It turns out to be pretty cool—though when I got there, the artists had been at it for a grand total of 90 minutes and, not surprisingly, didn’t have a lot to show for it yet. The artists work on these things all week long and usually don’t finish them until Saturday night or even Sunday. The first shot you see here, of a completed street painting, is from a past arts festival. (The photo is from the arts festival Web site and I’m guessing it was taken by Bob Baumbach.)
By the way, I’m assuming that this woman with the blue-and-gold head scarf is a replica of a famous painting? Does anyone happen to know the name of the work and the artist? Art history is not my long suit.
Anyway, by contrast, 90 minutes into the first day of the street painting, most of the works look more like this next shot. This is Penn State art education grad Abby Gleixner Cramer ’06, and as you can see, she’s just getting started.
Abby has been involved with the street painting festival since its inception—except for one year when she was studying art in Italy. While most of the artists in the project get 6-foot-by-4-foot chunks of pavement to work with, Abby has a much bigger “canvas,” as it were, to work with. I didn’t catch the actual dimensions, but suffice it to say that she’s got one of the two showcase spots.
She’s painting—in chalk—a replica of N.J. Wyeth’s 1933 painting “William Penn: Man of Vision, Courage, Action,” and she told me she’ll spend 10 hours a day on it from now through Saturday.
I’m looking forward to going back later in the week to see the finished products. Between now and then I need to scheme a way to get up onto the second floor of one of the nearby buildings (does the Deli have a roof, I wonder?) to get some shots from above.
Tina Hay, editor
Entry filed under: Campus events, University Park campus. Tags: Abby Cramer, Abby Gleixner, Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, Italian street painting, N.C. Wyeth, sidewalk chalk, Steve Tressler, William Penn: Man of Vision Courage Action.
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1. John | July 9, 2009 at 1:25 pm
It’s a Vermeer masterpiece called Girl with the Pearl Earring. It inspired a wonderful feature film, starring Scarlet Johanson, a few years back.
2. 3d chalk drawings | July 18, 2009 at 6:43 am
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[...] photos I took over the course of the festival. One place where I spent a lot of time was the Italian Street Painting Festival on Hiester Street—I kept stopping back to see how the “paintings” (actually chalk) [...]