Filed under: Art, Phoenix | Tags: Art, Breeze, Downtown Phoenix, Lalo Cota, Murals, Phoenix
Yes, another mural by collaborators Lalo Cota and Thomas Breeze Marcus. Funny, but I had seen photos of this and didn’t know where it was. It is also on Calle 16 but farther south and I guess that is not a street that I used to go that far south on regularly.
Lalo’s calavera and car and Breeze’s organic designs are trademarks of both artists.
Even the irrigation box was included in the mural (and it’s by former Phoenix, now LA muralist, Jorael Elliott).
The mural is on the side of a building housing The Hive (a gallery) and The Bee’s Knees, a shop that sells art, clothing, all sorts of cool items.
And these are on the front of the building:
Here is the bee that I showed a couple of posts ago.
And this is a new mural called the Nectar of Life by Katie Beltran and Amanda Adkins. It’s not quite finished.
Check out Breeze’s website to see what he and some other artists are up to this summer in the Navajo Nation.
Filed under: Arizona, Art, Home, Jewelry | Tags: Arizona, Art, Flora, Home, Jewelry
Let’s pretend for a minute that this is resin from a coniferous tree, not sap from a coniferous tree…although maybe some of it is resin, I’m not sure. This is our Goldwater Pine (thank you, Montucky, for the ID). Well, if it is resin, then maybe in a few tens of millions of years it will become amber, which is fossilized resin from prehistoric pine trees.
I only recently got “into” amber and gave it much thought. I love jewelry in general so I thought that, over these hot summer months in Phoenix, when it can be hard to get motivated to go out and shoot, I might show you some of my jewelry collection. I’m not going to show you my sparkly kitty necklaces, which I do have (and wear and love), or those sorts of things but, rather, jewelry that is interesting in some way…antique, vintage, rough-stoned, ethnic, with a story, that sort of stuff…and that should cover a lot of posts.
I bought this lovely necklace and earrings at the Musical Instrument Museum, a gorgeous place with awesome acoustics, where we recently attended a concert (museum gift shops have the best stuff!). It’s Baltic amber and turquoise. Almost 98% of the amber on the market is from the Baltic region; I’m not sure of the origin of this turquoise but amber and turquoise seem to be often paired in jewelry.
Amber comes in many colors, translucent and opaque, often with plant or insect parts embedded in it. It glows, as you can see. Because it is such an ancient material, it holds properties, if you believe in that, and I do. How can it not, with the earth being a living thing?
Amber exerts positive influence on the endocrine system, spleen, heart. Healing, soothing, harmonizing. Electrically active with solidified golden light. Stabilizes kundalini awakening. Activates altruistic nature. Spiritualizes the intellect. Chakras: navel, solar plexus, crown.
That sounds good to me. A few days ago, I purchased another chunk of amber on etsy, from Palimpsest Blue. This piece of more opaque, honey-colored amber is also from the Baltic.
I always like wearing jewelry with several stones because I figure I will have a pretty good day with all those properties covered. This is a bracelet of the world, as the maker described it, because it also has turquoise, smoky quartz, jasper, copper and silver heishi from Ethiopia, and silver from the Karen Hill Tribe of Thailand. The 6 pieces of turquoise are from the Castle Dome mine, depleted since the 1970s, in Globe, Arizona, so these pieces made it back home again.
I would mention the many healing properties of turquoise here but my next jewelry post, in a few days, will be about some pretty Native American jewelry made with turquoise and other stones.
Did you have an amber teething ring or necklace when you were a baby? Apparently they used to be quite popular to relieve the pain of teething and are now becoming so again.
Maybe in a few million years, some strange earth beings will wear amber from my pine tree’s resin.
Filed under: Art, Phoenix | Tags: Art, Coffeehouses, Downtown Phoenix, Isaac N. Caruso, Murals, Phoenix, Valley of the Sunflowers
These sunflowers are on the back of monOrchid, a gallery I’ve written about before in downtown Phoenix. They are done by a new-to-me muralist, Isaac N. Caruso. He just recently graduated from Northern Arizona University with a BFA in Visual Communication and he is making his presence known in Phoenix now.
You can see the grasshopper from my last post here.
I could only photograph from outside the fence so the chainlinks are smudging up some of these photos.
This mural honors, of course, the Valley of the Sunflowers, a couple of blocks away which is now in its final harvest (you can see a slideshow of the harvest here).
The reason that this mural is currently fenced in is because this burned out historic building is being restored.
I went around to another side of monOrchid that I had photographed before and there was Isaac N. Caruso himself putting some finishing touches on the orchid.
He also painted the bird for the brand new Songbird Coffee & Tea House, which is in the front of monOrchid.
(This is Songbird’s photo above.)
I think we are going to be seeing a lot more of Isaac on the walls of Phoenix.
*Update: I guess Isaac liked the photos because he is now using the second one from the bottom as his profile pic on his Facebook page. Cool.
Filed under: Art, Home, Phoenix | Tags: Art, Downtown Phoenix, Murals, Phoenix
Well, I guess you can pretty much tell which are the murals and which is the real thing. I guess the signature above gives that one away.
Over the next few days, I’ll show you the full murals. As for the real dragonfly, I got it out of our breezeway before either Grady or Stripey, our two little outdoor huntresses spotted it. And Grady was right under it at the time so it had a close call. It’s very seldom that I ever see a dragonfly around here.
Phoenix, like many other cities, holds First Fridays, primarily in the downtown arts district but also in some other areas of town. These events attract several thousand people and have a street fair atmosphere. Along with admittance to the galleries, there is music, arts and crafts booths, vendors, food trucks, and street performers. We also have Third Fridays, a slightly tamer version of First Fridays.
This 1,950 square foot mural on the side of one of the galleries, Vermillion, pays homage to First Fridays. It’s interesting in that it was painted by Joe Pagac, who I’ve written about before, as he is commissioned to paint a new mural on the side of eye lounge, another gallery, every First Friday. However, the mural is based on the work of another man, Fred Tieken, who painted this scene on a smaller scale and, when he recovered from a liver transplant, his friend, and the owner of the gallery, Dan Vermillion, wanted to celebrate him and commissioned Pagac to replicate Tieken’s painting.
The scenes depicted are experiences Tieken has had walking around on First Fridays. “First Friday’s not just about the art scene any more,” Tieken says. “It’s all these people, all these interactions — positive and negative.”
You can read more about it and see Tieken’s original painting here.
I don’t think I’ve had most of these experiences but, hey, maybe it’s time for me to go again.
