Paul Angiolillo www.paul.angiolillo.net Giant Seedlings It's a pleasant, unplanned (at least by humans) happening in the city: a tuft or stalk of greenery thrusting up from the pavement (or a wall or an abutment). One roots for the underdog. It's also a pleasing interplay of shape and color: radiating, multi-hued plant life and a planar, muted background. And of course there's the symbolism...Temporality, Pride, Humility...Like 17th-century Dutch painters who specialized in allegorical scenes of Classical ruins in the woods. So I offer these monumental seedlings as a tribute to a timeless, elemental natural process, which is also a symbol of Resilience, and to such visual pleasures as can be found if one looks for them. proposal sketch |
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Centro Presente with Wil Renderos cpresente.org The Contributions of Immigrant Youth in the |
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Flyn Costello Color Fish I chose this image for a column in Somerville because of it's simplicity in that it is fun and easy to look at. I wish to create something bright and colorful that is uplifting for the moment that you pass by it and hopefully it invites a smile to the seer's face. This image can be seen in many ways in relation to the environment that it is shown in. It represents diversity in form and color and peaceful existence amongst all of us who live together. |
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Gary Duehr www.garyduehr.com From the Second Story Who are these people? Where are they going? More images from this series can be seen at: |
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Meredith Fitzgerald Networks I've been working on a series of representations of above ground and below ground networks that would fit perfectly in an urban space like under the McGrath Highway. The two images I have been using to demonstrate this are telephone poles and their attendant wires and imagined underground root systems. I express the energy flowing through the wires of these ubiquitous telephone poles with bright colors. The roots I paint and print are vivid, sprawling networks that I imagine everytime I see a sidewalk pushed out of place by a neighboring tree. The telephone poles bring power and information to our homes here in Somerville much like the roots of a tree bring nourishment and water to a tree. proposal sketch |
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Radiant Jasmin and Abundance and Prosperity for All My imagery and text for this painting depicts a beautiful world where there is food and housing for all people and animals. Trees and flowers are growing, fish are happily swimming and birds and butterflies are flying in the sky. There are bike paths and community gardens for each household and solar panels on the houses. Two sides of the column will have representational imagery and two will have more abstract nature imagery. I am coordinating the One Voice Summer Arts Program with the Boston Arts Project this summer at the Randolph High School in Randolph, MA. This program will have children from 6 to 16 years old. I will sketch the outlines and have the children paint some of the imagery. Working on a public art project will help to raise the children's self esteem, especially of the teens, because the high school almost lost accreditation this year and was getting a lot of negative press. I have been an art consultant for 7 years with a Boston area firm and have coordinated & supervised many temporary public art installations in hospitals and other family friendly environments, and I have taught art in many after school and community art programs. proposal sketch |
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Jennifer Judge and Amy Morrison Jennifer: jennyrj_2000@yahoo.com Pod Amy and I are both interested in the idea of transforming spaces. As practicing artists and art therapists, we are often faced with the challenge of creating art or doing therapeutic work in environments that are less than ideal; in homeless shelters, school cafeterias, outdoors on sidewalks and in residential settings. Recreating these spaces is an exciting opportunity for transformations to occur. Amy and I are able to use light, color shapes and texture to make these changes happen. |
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Cathy Lu Who Can Tell the Difference? My piece will be made of latex, ceramic, and white fabric. It will be composed of individual faces, some a yellowish latex, some a white fabric, each with ceramic eyes. The eyes will be shaped like stereotypical slanted East Asian eyes, however, with stereotypical ‘western’ eye colors like blue and green. The faces are life size. I plan to sew these faces onto the canvas. The title of this piece is taken from the last line of a famous classical Chinese poem about the war heroine, Mulan, who crosses traditional gender roles without anyone realizing. This piece is about my own identity, being Chinese and American, and crossing culture roles. This ‘crossing’ of culture roles is a complex one that happens unnoticed, but significantly affects all social interactions. Wrapping a column under McGrath would be an appropriate spot for these faces. I want them to be on the wall quietly observing. I want the viewer to notice this space that typically goes unnoticed, and become aware that the space is actually staring back at the viewer. |
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Sarah Meyers www.sarahartist.comsmeyers00@hotmail.com Big Juicy Flowers I have for a number of years had an obsession with painting flowers. I would love to paint large juicy flowers to go around a column on the McGrath Highway. Somerville being one of the fifth densest cities in the country could use always use some more floral elements. Although my flowers are not “dainty” they are full of color and life. I believe that I keep painting them in hopes to capture a true feeling of the beauty, hardship, and adventure of life. In my paintings I explore a sense of narration and abstraction to try to arrive at an expression of my feelings about life: a recording of its beauty and complexity, along with its sadness and finite nature. Although I illustrate images normally associated with joy, such as a woman in a garden of flowers or a couple embracing, I believe that the cacophony of mark and globby energy of my paint infuse the subjects with new meaning. The variety of opposing marks, big and small, curved and straight, dark and light, mirror my feelings about the complexities of life. My figures and landscapes exist on the surface as marks of paint and collage, both beautiful and ugly, bright and muddy, glittery and dark. The wealth and richness of the paint depict an illusion of these moments of life and at the same time deny their reality by making you acutely aware of the paint on the canvas. So too do we experience life, in vivid flashes of experiences, with the underlying knowledge that all moments are transitory. I paint feelings personal to my own life, but I believe that my paintings speak to everyone’s life experience. |
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Matt Naboshek www.mattnabo.com City My imagery is representative of the energy that I find swirling around me as I walk the streets as an onlooker of life. The characters, shapes, sounds, history, tradition, and uniqueness is so rich that it inspires a person of any age who allows it to be part of their daily journey. I have chosen to skew a little younger with some of the imagery because I find so much of the happiness I have found in the city, has come from the sights and sounds of families and children living happily in the surrounding communities. There is also an underlying theme of transportation and pedestrian travel. I find a lot of the character that the city has to offer, comes from it’s overwhelming sense of people moving from one place to the next, crisscrossing over one another like clockwork, using different modes of transportation.
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Noelle Proulx-DeCain Movement in Space My piece is based on the idea of a continuous movement of line throughout a space and beyond. The concept began with thinking about arial views of land and how space becomes broken up by line but the natural balance and flow of the land is always apparent. Line and color begin forming different shapes and spaces but as that occurs they still remain harmonious. I think this concept can also be applied to the idea of community - of people coming from different places and backgrounds and living together, of the way people (lines) bring about changes that become a natural movement of a place. |
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Susan Rice susanrice79.googlepages.com/homericetoon@yahoo.com Marsupial Dig My images in the project would be the next step in an ongoing body of work,(mostly prints, up to this point) about extinct animals, and animals whose numbers, habitat or way of life have been directly affected by humans (ie, extinction, incarceration, forced migration). The images of the various beasts may be overlapped to suggest a traffic jam, stampede, or parade. The animals/background would be painted in high contrast colors, and large enough to see from a car or bus. |
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Andrew Sloan www.newsherrif.comandrew@newsherrif.com TBA Over the past decade, Andrew Sloan’s post-Pop graphic paintings and illustrations have appeared on a wide variety of surfaces and media. From outdoor murals and gallery walls, to cars and clothes, Sloan has developed a distinctive style incorporating vivid colors and bold lines. With a degree in Anthropology and a professional background in design, his influences include cartoons, maps, travel, graffiti, logos, typography, street culture and popular music.
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Janet Van Fleet www.janetvanfleet.comjanetvanfleet@fairpoint.net Circle Wrap My design is part of a series of circular images I have been doing for several years now. Because the imagery is not narrative or figurative (not "about" something, or "a picture of something") it is very accessible to lots of people. In that fascinating way that art operates, different people make their own meaning when they look at this circular motif. Most folks find it cheerful, bubbly, and fun. My own thought about it is that it represents discrete bits of matter that could exist on a variety of scales -- from sub-atomic particles to suns, moons, and galaxies. |
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WRAP'EM: Column Art Under McGrath will be shown July 26 through September 28, 2008.
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