Coinciding with his current exhibition at Fifty24SF, Barcelona-based street artist Aryz recently painted a mural in San Francisco in collaboration with public art organization WallspaceSF. Titled “The Style is the Limit,” Aryz’s solo show explores the idea of artists setting limitations on their own creativity in order to develop an individual style. The show features new paintings as well as studies and a sculpture. These small-scale works inform Aryz’s process in creating his enormous, surreal outdoor works. Take a look at the completed mural and some process shots below and check out some of Aryz’s other recent murals and photos from his studio below.
Granville Street, 1970s
Source: Photo by Al Ingram, City of Vancouver Archives #800-481
Mark Boyko
East Hastings, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 60”
Mark Boyko’s canvasses are forcefully immersive and strikingly beautiful to look at. They are especially successful when seen in person and on a large scale. With elongated brushtrokes bursting from a strong vanishing point, Mark invites the audience into his bleary Vancouver landscapes. Despite their monochromatism, the paintings have an energy which breathe both inwards and outwards, sometimes highlighted by a single stroke or fleck of pale colour.
A student of world-renowned superstar artist Alessandro Papeti, Boyko, fortunately for us, has translated this painting technique to capture his hometown of Vancouver in an aesthetic language that depicts space as emotion rather than description.
A few more closeups of the great Vancouver Paint-in from VanArchives. The last painting here is by prolific folk artist Gordon Kit Thorne; the other works appear to be unsigned. In Gordon’s painting, he has painted a garden scene with flowering cherry trees, with the words “Gone but not FORGOTTEN”. He appears to be lamenting the loss of some cherry trees located in front of the art gallery, before the fountain was installed (you can see the Hotel Georgia in the background). For further reading, see Carol DeFina’s fairly extensive history of Vancouver’s cherry trees for the Vancouver Park Board, posted on the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival website.
West Georgia Street, Thursday 7 April 1966
Source: Photo by Ernie H Reksten, City of Vancouver Archives #2010-006.076
“Where’d you grow up?”
“We’re growing up right now.”(Cambridge, MA)
East Hastings, 1932
Source: City of Vancouver Archives #20-51 (cropped)
