[nnasnet] 'Birds' in NYC...
- From: "Katharina" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "trineberg2002" for DMARC)
- To: Nnasnet <nnasnet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:50:40 +0000 (UTC)
Katharina
watershed address: Newton's Pond>Beales Mill Run>Nomini Creek>Potomac
River>Chesapeake Bay>Atlantic Ocean
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/opinion/audubon-public-art-nyc.html?emc=edit_th_20171025&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=66971387
Public Art Takes Flight
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD OCT. 24, 2017Louise Jones, with her husband, Gabe,
working on a mural of an evening grosbeak. Photographs by Karsten Moran for The
New York Times In his final years, John James Audubon, the celebrated
19th-century painter of bird life, lived in rustic uptown Manhattan in a house
by the Hudson where some of his final paintings were of urban rats that caught
his eye. But birds remained his forte. And as Audubon lies in his grave up from
the river at West 155th Street and Broadway, Avi Gitler, a local art gallery
owner, will not let his legacy rest.A Baird’s sparrow painted by Ralph
Serrano.A black-chinned hummingbird. The artist, Ashli Sisk, has a background
in anthropology and metaphysics, and veterinary medicine.
For three years, Mr. Gitler and a crew of artful spray-painters and some who
stick to their brushes have been splashing giant-scale paintings of endangered
birds all over the neighborhood. Gleaming with avian beauty, they appear in
vivid colors as multistory murals on the sides of apartment buildings, as
epiphanies in alleyways and as scattered nocturnal flocks that burst into view
when shopkeepers roll down security gates where they are painted.“There’s
something beautiful about this fish crow perched where Audubon breathed his
last,” said Mr. Gitler of a gorgeously alert bird glaring four stories high
above a gas station on West 155th Street that now occupies part of the old
Audubon estate. Working closely with the National Audubon Society, Mr. Gitler
counts 80 bird paintings already in place out of 314 birds the society lists as
threatened by climate change.Key Detail, a Belarusian mural artist based in New
York, painted a great grey owl on the rolling gate of a pharmacy.A Townsend’s
warbler by an artist known as ATM on the door of a C-Town supermarket.A tour of
the Washington Heights and Harlem neighborhoods with the aid of an Audubon map
amounts to a new sort of bird-watching. It takes a search to track down the
Williamson’s sapsucker, bigger than life, down by the West Side Highway. The
black-billed magpie is visible all day now on the Broadway gates of the defunct
New Happiness Chinese Restaurant. Elsewhere, Audubon himself is rendered in
flesh tones and with mutton-chop sideburns, staring curiously at a cerulean
warbler on his shoulder with neither his rifle nor palette at hand.A
Williamson’s sapsucker by ATM. Karsten Moran for The New York Times The artists
are spray-painting professionals, paid modest fees, and not graffiti vandals.
Louise Jones set up last week with her eye on the mammoth task of painting two
grosbeaks on a stone-hard canvas 70 feet tall and 100 feet wide — the
wraparound sides of a church on West 149th Street off Amsterdam Avenue. Ms.
Jones is so accomplished at her special art that she arrived as a fully
certified operator of a powered lift-boom she uses to extend her eye and hand
100 feet high.ATM painted this red-faced warbler. Karsten Moran for The New
York Times The 19th-century feather trade almost wiped out the roseate
spoonbill, painted by Danielle Mastrion.“That’s a woman up there?” a pedestrian
asked Mr. Gitler.”That’s exactly the sort of artist I get excited about,” he
said, delighted to have seen Ms. Jones studiously consulting an Audubon field
guide supplied by her husband, Gabe, before she ascended alone with her muse
and spray can arsenal.Paul Johnson working on a mural of a bay-breasted warbler
and a semi-palmated plover.A parallel art for Mr. Gitler and Audubon officials
is persuading potentially sceptical building owners and community leaders that
the birds are creative reflections of a lively neighborhood. A recent tour
found residents notably appreciative, at least by the usual standards of New
York grumbling.A swallow-tailed kite and 12 other birds painted by Lunar New
Year.A pair of boat-tailed grackles by Ezo Wippler.“Birds are everywhere around
here — beautiful!” said a 17-year resident, Pat Arnao. “Why would something
like this bother me?” she asked, gesturing toward the first eye-catching
grosbeak impressions Ms. Jones had up. Trained in the fine arts, Ms. Jones said
she began painting small murals for friends. Her enthusiasm got bigger and so
did her art. “Now I like scraping the treetops,” she said.Mr. Gitler likes the
night-painting commissions, when shop gates are down and spray painters create
fresh creatures from the Audubon list with Fauvist zest. “It’s night and people
hang out and watch.”Four migratory birds painted by Gaia, an artist raised in
New York.
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