Box Painting - Back Detail

In late June I participated in an event for City Pages that was held at the Stone Arch Bridge Art Festival called "Art and Soul". Any artist in the Twin Cities could enter into the competition, and City Pages would select around 20 artists to decorate City Pages racks in such a way that they could show what was cool about Minneapolis and St. Paul. After being painted or spray-painted or drawn on the racks would be placed around the Twin Cities. Each artist chosen also gets a featured ad in City Pages about the rack they painted and about who they are as an artist. I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the artists they wanted to participate.

So I went to the festival, chose a rack to paint and spent about 8 hours painting this box outside under the hot summer sun – an experience which taught me just how hard that is. I was constantly thirsty, exhausted both physically and mentally (especially since I'd spent the whole of the day before, from 1:00 in the afternoon to 11:00 at night, at a wedding), and I got sunburned on both my arms and the top of my head.

About four hours in my nerves were jumping and my morale was waning. I might have given up right then and then had not my good friend DarkHumunculus showed up right then with some suntan spray and a helping hand. She was the one who painted all of those lovely bright yellow circles in the midsection of the rack. Sadly she had to go after that, but later my family showed up and I recruited my mother and little brother to help me finish the rack.

My little brother helped paint all the little eyes in the concave spaces on the back of the rack, and he worked with me on the snowflakes and the water. My mother painted the red flowers in the bottom section on the front of the rack. Both of them were of tremendous help and were good sports the whole of the way through, and were definitely contributors to the fact that I not only finished painting the box at all, but that I finished it early.

Though I was falling apart physically and mentally while I was working on this, I definitely learned a lot by this experience – I learned to be very prepared with the essentials for any intensive outside art making. I learned about how acrylic paint interacts with plastic rather than paper or canvas. I also learned to get a good night's sleep before doing eight hours of nothing but art making.