Farm Girl by Aryz

Polk and Eddy
The Tenderloin

This five-story farm girl — and her bushel of apples looks over the corner of Eddy and Polk. Aryz deliberately used muted colors, especially flesh tones, to paint the lady onto this beige building.

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“I feel it’s really aggressive when you paint in a public space, so I don’t really want to play with bright colors. It would be too much,” Aryz says. “I’d prefer that people who are observing [the scene] find the work by themselves. The last few walls I’ve done like this.”

Of the world’s top street artists, Aryz sits alongside names such as Banksy, JR, ROA and Blek le Rat. Aryz, a Spaniard who lives in a town near Barcelona, is 24 years old and has been doing street art — starting with graffiti — for a decade. His Tenderloin girl, at 665 Eddy St., is his first street work in California after a busy few years transforming buildings across Europe and other parts of the Americas.

Much of Aryz’s art is slyly humorous — his farm girl has a small top hat flying off her head — and when you combine that sly absurdity with his obvious painting talent (Aryz studied art in college) and his eagerness to exhibit in the open air, it’s no surprise that Aryz would have a growing fan base stretching far beyond the usual street art crowd, and far beyond Spain.

Aryz’s Tenderloin project was accomplished through behind-the-scenes negotiations and timely generosity. Chris Shaher, a San Francisco art curator and art activist who runs the organization WallSpaceSF, has an agreement with the owners of 665 Eddy St. to put select street art on the building’s western facade. To let Aryz work from the roof of the KFC next door, Shaher’s team also had to secure permission.Deborah Munk, director of Recology’s Artist in Residence Program, donated the paint for Aryz’s Tenderloin project. This community approach to street art meant that Aryz could — unlike, say, the stealth-oriented Banksy — work in the middle of the day, without disguise, without interruption. Even in his hydraulic lift high above Eddy Street, Aryz greets anyone who shouted to him from below. Aryz says he doesn’t want to be a “celebrity” street artist, and doesn’t want the trappings of museum shows, where audio guides detail every facet of the art on display. His farm girl has no formal name.

“I don’t really care about saying what it is — I just want people to see it,” says Aryz, who was born in Palo Alto, where he lived until age 3, when his family moved back to Spain. “The problem in the art business is that you have to create your own ‘character,’ and the art business sells your art as a whole thing. Of course the artist is a whole thing. Everything affects your art and the way you do things. But in the end, what remains is the art, not the artist. So that’s what I think is important. It’s not important how I look like. Or how I am. In the end, what’s important is what I do.”

This was excerpted from an article in the SF Weekly by Jonathan Curiel.  To read the entire article go here.

This higher up and  closer view is courtesy of Graffuturism.com