Swimming through Jessie Square

Site of the future Mexican Museum
706 Mission District
Museum Row
SOMA

This is titled Exploring New Territory and is by Henry Lipkis.  This wall is the edge of the construction site for the forthcoming Mexican Museum, so the piece will be temporary.

This is from Henry’s blog: “Back in October I painted my first big public mural in San Francisco. It started back in July when I applied to do an interactive mural as a performance piece for Yerba Buena Night, a cultural art happening in Jessie Square. At first I was going to get a big roll of canvas and unroll it on some wall and do my piece there. Thankfully these Yerba Buena folk think big and my contact told me he was going to find a wall for me. He called me about a month later and we met up in front of this 70 foot wall and he said “Here it is”. Then he asked how many panels of it I wanted to paint so they could get the appropriate amount of lights for the event. Pfff how many panels… if they were giving me access to this entire huge wall I wanted to paint the entire thing! So they did indeed rig up this entire wall with clamp lamps so that i could continue to paint into the night of the event.

All told, I was painting for 12 hours straight from 10 am to 10 pm  and it was great to work with such an awesome institution.”

About painting “To take a previously mundane surface and splash paint and twist colors around one another, pushing ideas here and there in a mad frenzy until finally a scene pokes its toes into the realm of readability, it gets me higher than anything else ever could. I can’t get enough of it, dancing with my mind and body through dimensions of abstraction and bringing back a handful of solid images to show people where I went.

I hope to lure people in with a tasty, digestible, morsel of an image and from there to snatch them into the realm of abstraction, help them dance around with their own subconscious, and deliver them back to their daily life with a slightly dizzy feeling.”

There is an interesting article on YM&C if you would like to explore further.

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