some inspiration for you

im taking an experimental painting class at school, taught by tom dowling (and yes i confirmed it is in fact tattoo artist colin dowling's father). we learned about a few artists in our first lecture, including street artist barry mcgee who i took interest to.












( the rest of this interview can be found at http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mcgee/clip2.html )

ART:21: You seem to be very interested in the history of graffiti, as something that's been happening since ancient times.

MCGEE: "Of course, if I see something, I know it's something that everyone does and have done for centuries upon centuries. The thing that I'm interested in now is the idea of getting rid of it, this war on getting rid of it, and this idea of silencing it or trying to get rid of something. To me, that's the more interesting thing: how in today's climate there can be huge billboards and bus stop kiosks with advertising, and then along comes like a simple tag or something that someone does on it, and that thing is immediately removed overnight. To me, that's what is really interesting about the whole thing now. It's about the idea of public space and how people can function in public space anywhere. It's gotten tighter and tighter, since the Reagan-Bush era - the idea of private space and who can go into this space or a park - what is considered a park now. As those things get tighter and tighter and privately owned property and surveillance and what not is increased, so is this thing on the street. It also increases too for some odd reason. And I'm not exactly sure why it's that way, but I find it really interesting how quickly they want to get rid of this thing. There could be a rooftop that is just sitting dormant for a while, and someone goes up there and does an amazing piece of graffiti or whatever you want to call it. And then that's removed and two months later there's a huge billboard over the whole spot anyway.
So it has to do with money and who has access to space. And when I feel like the access to space is cut off for the general public, I feel like that makes me want to do stuff on the street even that much more. And the stuff in the galleries is just arty. The art crowd is arty, and it's the same people. Sometimes I feel like if I do something indoors, my circle of people that sees things is getting smaller and smaller, where if I'm outdoors it's open to anyone to look at, or see or hate or whatnot. But doing stuff indoors - there's some good things about it, but I know the audience is very limited."


we also learned about margaret kilgallen, barry's wife. in the pbs video we watched, called "art 21", it showcased mcgee and kilgallen working on their art together. including but not limited to a pleasant scene, a few minutes long, of the husband and wife in a trainyard making some magic with a couple of markers. after the video mr. dowling informed us that a couple years after the video was made, margaret died of cancer in 2001. It was very interesting and sad to watch an artist create beautiful art for a five minutes on a TV screen and then learn that they are actually six feet under, today. Imagine becoming immersed in a video of monet working on his amazing waterlily paintings, only to learn a few minutes after that this sacredly creative soul is gone. kind of a strange feeling.

here are a couple shots referring to margaret killgallen.