Creative Adventures in Portland

I found a great patch of graffiti on the streets of Florence right before we left.  This building looked like a kids school based on a bike rack full of tiny bikes.  There was some well crafted graffiti pieces that were carelessly vandalized with a single black line through some of them.  Right next to this building was a street underpass that was covered with some amazing characters and lettering.  Kim refused to go through this area at night, but she let me come back the next day after I threw a temper tantrum.

I just got back from a 2-1/2 week adventure in Europe with my wife Kim.  I captured as much street art as possible; I do have some standards about what I got and everything I’m posting captured my eye for one reason or another.  Our trip consisted of just under a week in each of three countries; Spain, France and Italy.  Hands down the best work I saw was from the window of trains and went uncaptured.

SPAIN-

I spent about a week between Barcelona and Costa Brava.  The work was much more sporadic and less refined among the smaller coastal towns, but Barcelona was very cool.  All of the businesses had metal roll up doors, and every single one was full of graffiti ranging from pretty refined burns to scrappy scrawls.  Strolling through the city at various times of the day provided different views of the work as businesses would open or close their doors with their businesses.  On sunday, nearly everything was closed and the city was an incredible graffiti gallery.  On the last day in Barcelona we stumbled into a park of extremely well executed work that I captured every single piece of.  Kim got frustrated as I walked like a zombie through a park mesmerized by this spectacular show; the park was home to the homeless and she’ll never let me forget the human feces on the sidewalk.  I told her to focus on the positives.

Sometimes Craigs List is crazy.  I responded to an Ad on friday afternoon that basically said “We are heading to Burning Man and want a crazy mural on our van before we head out.  We’ll be in Portland for one evening on our way down, anybody want to trade a bunch of beer to paint our van?”  Of course I did!!  I got the hook up from some new friends on a bunch of Ninkasi and Rogue Beer and in turn spent about 4 hours painting their van.  I ran out of daylight towards the end, but got this great picture from the first side.  Hopefully when they return from burning man more pictures will surface.