City Paint 13 – Urban Jungle Mural
Six months after I posted City Paint 5.1 – Ironclad Tattoo Re-do, the artist, Shae Petersen (AKA: FiftyK), happened to stumble across my blog and commented on the photos. He also informed me that he had just completed another mural…and invited me to stop-by for a visit.
I hope you’ll forgive the bit of sun-flare in the first three photos. I managed to find someone nearby who allowed me into the fenced and locked property at almost noon on a mid-week day…so I couldn’t be choosy with the shooting arrangements…full sun overhead…shadows near the mural…anyway…I hope you’ll enjoy the images despite their flaws….
Shae told me that he had been commissioned by the Utah Arts Alliance to paint the Urban Jungle mural.
He said that it will be the backdrop feature for a new urban-art garden that will be constructed in the empty lot that is immediately in front of the mural. The painting is actually on a reception center building located at 615 West 100 South in Salt Lake City.
When I asked him about the theme and how much liberty he and Chew had in creating the mural, he said that they were essentially told to use their discretion and make it however they wanted to.
Shae told me that he and another artist, Chew, the owner of Mark’s Ark combined their talents to create the mural that they have named “Urban Jungle.”
He also told me that Chew had worked on other murals that you may have seen here on my blog… City Paint 1 – 5 Monkeys Bar and City Paint 3 – 2012 – The End?, as well as the recently posted City Paint 12.2 – 2020…Perfect Vision, and the Ironclad Tattoo mural that I mentioned above.
He said the urban jungle theme just struck them as appropriate…the animals don’t really have any significance in their selection or appearance…just seemed that they belonged there.
The mural is 127 feet in length and took the artists about two weeks to complete…for a cost of $1500.00….
You can follow this link to view more of Shae’s work.
Thank you for spending a bit of your day with me. I hope you enjoyed the fantastically colored and skillfully rendered mural as much as I did. If you’d like to view more of the City Paint Series, as well as other tidbits of street art and graffiti that I’ve found in the Salt Lake City area, you can scroll to the bottom of the page, find the “Categories” widget, and then click on “Street Art – Graffiti.”
City Paint 12.2 – 2020…Perfect Vision – Mural Complete
Wow….I guess it’s been a while since I posted the beginning of this mural in City Paint 12.1 – 2020…Perfect Vision. I had stopped-by and taken photos of the progress on another four occasions, but had not managed to get it all together in posts to show the work…so here we are, ten months later (Really?!) and I’m just now sharing the end result…and as chance/fate would have it, this mural has already been covered and work is being done on a new one. Stay tuned….
The panorama shots that I made didn’t turn-out real well…and my stitching capabilities are nil…so we’re left with three images that I hope you can imagine as an entire mural…looking from the left in the above image…to the middle in the photo below…
…and to the far right in the next image below…three panels depicting a perfect vision for the future…maybe…hoping that we can see as clearly….?
I’ve also provided a handful of close-up images to demonstrate the detail…to show the brush-strokes of the spray-painted mural.
I do know that parts of the mural were, indeed, spray-painted, as I’ve shared in the first post…but, I am not sure if the individual artists who contributed to the greater image used brushes or not. If you remember the western mural that I shared in City Paint 6.5, you might also recall the images of the artist using an actual brush.
When sharing other artists’ work in these and other images, I attempt to give credit where it is due. I do not know all of the artists’ names who participated in creating this huge mural, but I do know that Kier Defstar played a significant role, as I was so informed by the Korner Market staff when I inquired about the 2012 mural in City Paint 3.
If you look closely at the various images, you will be able to see other names, as well…. I have heard about some of these other artists and have only seen the names of still others of them…but here they are: Brute, Amer, Mark’s Ark, Aloha Family, Marlee, Lost Art, and Sily. If there are other artists who worked on the mural, I apologize for not naming them…I simply don’t know who they are right now. With any luck (?), some of the other artists might happen across the images on my blog and let me know that they, too, contributed to the masterpiece…….it’s happened before……
I have offered that the Aloha Family is a group of artists, simply because it appears in the below photo that they are…possibly the individual artists’ names are here, too?
And maybe this is another artist’s signature?
Is the space-ship preparing to kidnap a large cat in the image below? I’m not sure…but I do love the detail on the woman’s portrait….
This is crazy beautiful as you stand next to it on the street and look at it face to face……
And finally, what I understand to be the centerpiece of the mural, the exotic woman looking into and maybe even divining the future…she appears to be a mixture of the various phenotypes of our human species…intelligent, strong, beautiful……
Thank you, as always, for visiting…for spending your time with me. I hope you’ve enjoyed viewing the finished product of the 2020 Perfect Vision mural. If you’d like to see the other City Paint images of street art and graffiti from around Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “Street Art – Graffiti” category to see all of them.
it’s not what you look at…
A modern interpretation and expression of: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau……found at the ruins of the Tintic Standard Reduction Mill just east of Goshen, Utah….
Tintic Standard Reduction Mill
A week or so ago, my second son and I headed out into the beyond…took a tour around Utah Lake…essentially followed in the tire-tracks of my third son who had made the trip on his bike last summer. At the southern end of the lake, the road heads back east. About two and a half miles past the town of Goshen, you can see what appears to be the remains of something on the side of a mountain. Even from a distance, you can also see that it has been frequented by taggers and graffiti artists. My cycling son had mentioned the ruins after his ride and suggested that we needed to check it out sometime.
After leaving this site and finding a stronger signal for his phone, my second son determined that these were/are the ruins of the Tintic Standard Reduction Mill…an ore processing facility that was built between 1919-1921…and only used for four years…so it has been standing vacant and abandoned since 1925. For a very brief history of the mill, you can click on the highlighted name to be taken to the Wiki article that provides a bit of information.
This link to the Historic American Engineering Record provides a more extensive history…and shows us what the ruins looked like back in 1971, after it had been abandoned for 46 years, and before a select demographic of our country decided that they needed to decorate the place with their spray-painted opinions and expressions of art. The following images represent what the place looks like today…42 years after the essentially “clean” images from 1971…and 88 years after it was abandoned.
The entirety of the mill structure spans an elevation equivalent to eight stories of a building and is situated on the side of Warm Springs Mountain, 5,535 ft elev.
The circular structures are leaching vats where the crushed ore would be chemically processed to remove the silver, copper, lead, and gold.
Don’t know enough about it to even guess what the circular things below were/are….
Under the vats…supports…drains(?)…retention walls….
The inside of a leaching vat…
These are the ore bins toward the right of the photo…above the leaching vats.
A view looking over the ore bins…with my son at the far end.
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My son looking into the silver precipitator…the square-shaped structure with the conical (inverted pyramids) chute underneath…situated to the left of the leaching vats in the third photo above.
If you click on the link for the Historic American Engineering Record, you can see the diagrams that identify the various parts of the mill that I have named in the post…the leaching vats, silver precipitator, ore bins, roaster, etc….
I believe that’s the water tank in the photo below…with Savannah and Shilo painted on it…….and if you look in the very first photo above…and notice the somewhat removed, shadowy structure to the very bottom right, those are the lead precipitate bins…..
Looking over the ore bins…in the opposite direction.
The front of the roaster section….
I believe the space between the large structure on the right side of the image and the broken-through wall (that general area) is where the crusher was located…and the large structure is where the ore was roasted.
Warm Springs pond/lake below the mill….
Looking over the roaster, ore bins, silver precipitator, and leaching vats….
The below image is from the highest, developed area of the mill…where I was standing on the remaining foundation of what I believe you can see in the very top left corner of the last image of the post.
The Tintic Standard Reduction Mill before its decline….
Hmm…so this post was quite a bit longer than my normal fare…but I hope you enjoyed it anyway…..
As always, thank you for being here.
City Paint 5.1 – Ironclad Tattoo Re-do
It’s been several weeks since I posted anything in the City Paint series on street art and graffiti that I’ve discovered while driving about Salt Lake City, so here’s a new one that I thought was just too good not to share. I was surprised the other morning to have noticed that Ironclad Electric Tattooing has a new mural. If you’re interested, you can check-out the earlier work in this previous post, City Paint 5 – Ironclad Tattoo. And, of course, if you’d like to revisit any of the other street art or graffiti posts, just scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on the Street-art/Graffiti category.
The first shot is of the entire mural as it appears on the building and the remaining photos are close-ups of the various parts.
I haven’t had the opportunity to learn about who the artist might be, although there is a partial email address of the likely artist(s) in the bottom right-hand corner of the first photo.
City Paint 6.5 – “Becoming” Artist’s Insight
In my most recent post on this western mural, City Paint 6.4 – “Becoming” almost finished…, I mentioned that I had spoken with the artist and that we were going to meet the following weekend. Well…because of life and parades and being called-in to work, that meeting finally took place three weekends later.
Aside from talking about life and relationships with girlfriends and wives, his siblings, my children, living in military families, maturing on our paths in life, sports, mixed-martial-arts, college, art, blogging, sports-talk-radio, trust, forgiveness, graffiti, street code, bastards who tag over other artists’ work, guns, bartering, Utah history, and religion…we also talked about his mural….
The artist, Gerry (pronounced “Gary”) Swanson (at www.silentswanart.com), has named the mural “Five on Five,” a sports reference to a battle being waged between a group of Native Americans and a group of western cowboys.
He was not formally commissioned to paint the mural, but he has done work for Gallenson’s Gun Shop in the past, so the store owner trusted that he would create something appropriate without having any guidelines or requirements. Gerry said he wanted the mural to showcase an event from the history of the Mountain West…which included guns.
He said that the canyon provides a literal and metaphorical boundary or divide between the opposing sides, such geographical features are common to the Mountain West area, so it seemed fitting that it would be the line of demarkation between the participants.
When I asked him if this was a fair fight, guns vs bows and arrows, he said that the cowboys might have had a technological advantage, but the braves were stronger physically and had time and nature on their side. The sun was painted as it was to represent the familiar image of the Maya calendar, easily applied to these native people, as they are of the same indigenous stock as the Maya. The natives were aware of time, but it was simply part of life, the cowboys were caught-up in time and attemtpted to control it, marking their actions and lives by its rules. The vegetation was supporting the braves, pushing them into the battle, while it was wrapping around the cowboys and hindering their efforts.
Gerry said that the cowboys weren’t in full control of their horses and are off balanced and not shooting straight, one cowboy is even on the ground wielding a bowie knife…while one of the natives isn’t even presenting a weapon…he’s in the charge, yes, but not needful of a weapon yet…so the battle isn’t as unfair as it might first appear.
The natives and the cowboys are painted the same color because they share in the brotherhood of their singular species, yet the braves have their white stripes and the cowboys have their red shirts, as opposing teams are given to wearing opposite colors when on the field of play.
Gerry said he put bandanas over the mouths of the cowboys to protect them against the dust, whereas the natives didn’t need the same protection, as they were adapted to their environment and had stronger constitutions. When I mentioned that some commentors on the blog thought the cowboys might have been hiding behind their masks, he said he hadn’t considered that perspective, but he likes it. He said he loves to stand within earshot of people as they are discussing the mural (or any of his other work), so he can hear what they think it means, and in that vein, he appreciates the comments and the thoughts that drive them.
Additional “essentials” for painting a mural on a bright, sunny, spring afternoon in Salt Lake City….
Gerry said it might be interesting to add birds or some other object to the bandanas to increase the effect, to heighten the observers’ awareness of them…. On a side note, Gerry said that he is not finished with the detail on the guns yet; I understood that there would be greater definition, but the bright silver will remain.
To view the other posts that show the progress of this mural, please click on these highlighted titles: City Paint 6.1 - Becoming, City Paint 6.2 – Progress Report on “Becoming,” and City Paint 6.3 – Another progress report on “Becoming.” You can also scroll to the bottom of this page and click on “Street Art – Graffiti” under the Categories heading to view all of the posts in the City Paint series.
City Paint 11 – Something-ist
I spoke with one of the men who works at the window/glass business to the left of this mural…he said it’s left-over from the arts festival that Salt Lake City sponsored last year or the year before…and he doesn’t know what it says….maybe one of you can figure out what it means…the letters appear to form into a word of something-ist…. I’d love to hear your ideas….
City Paint 6.4 – “Becoming” almost finished….
If you have been following my City Paint series for the past couple of months, and the “Becoming” series in particular, you will/might remember that I have been sharing the progress made by certain artists in creating a western mural with spray-paint. The mural is located in the alley/parking area behind Gallenson’s Gun Shop at 166 East 200 South, in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. To have a more complete understanding as to how the mural developed, and possibly a greater appreciation for the completed work, I would offer that you visit the earlier posts in their numerical order to witness their progress in “becoming.” To visit the earlier posts, just click on their highlighted names…City Paint 6.1 – Becoming, City Paint 6.2 – Progress Report on “Becoming,” and City Paint 6.3 – Another progress report on “Becoming.” If you are interested, you can also scroll to the bottom of the page and select the “Street Art – Graffiti” category to view the complete City Paint series.
I spoke with the artist today, Gerry Swanson, and am planning to meet him this coming Sunday to capture some images of the final work…stay tuned…. You can visit his website at www.silentswanart.com.
These last several shots are close-ups of different pieces of the mural, provided to show the finer details of the artists’ strokes (?) of applying the paint….
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City Paint 10 – Geekbox Computers
Not too far from my home is Geekbox Computers, a gaming-computer store with a beautiful mural on the side of the building. It has an almost surreal “2001 – Space Odyssey” feel to it. I love the image of the woman astronaut.
I tried to locate the author at the given website, but it’s not available….
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City Paint 9 – Oriental Furniture
The place is obviously closed…and the mural has been created on the wood that was used to cover the store-front windows. I was actually looking for the business next door at 50 East 300 South when I stumbled across this one. I rather like it….
City Paint 6.3 – Another progress report on “Becoming”
I can’t imagine that there’s much more work to be done in completing this mural…but then again, I’m not the artist, so I can’t fairly judge what else he/she/they might have planned. You can click on these earlier posts’ titles to see the progress that’s been made since the beginning of the work…City Paint 6.1 – Becoming, and City Paint 6.2 – Progress Report on “Becoming,” or you can scroll to the bottom of the page and select the “Street Art – Graffiti” category to view the complete City Paint series.
City Paint 8 – 7th West and Genesee
This is probably more “typical” of what comes to mind when we think of graffiti in the neighborhoods of a city. I took these photos in the Glendale area of Salt Lake City…an older part of town that is home to many Hispanic and Tongan families. This is also an area that has its share of difficulties with gang activity….
These last two shots contain messages from the building next door….
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City Paint 1.2 – 5 Monkeys Bar Addendum
I took my daughter out for a Saturday morning drive-about, looking to see what we might see…and so that she might find something to use in her “Art Appreciation” course for school. We went back to the site of City Paint 1 -5 Monkeys Bar in Murray, Utah, and found that they had added a new mural to their series…this one being their name-sake piece. Again, it was too good to resist another photo-shoot. On a side-note, this mural and the other 5 Monkey pieces were created by Kier, the same guy who did the huge mural that I featured in City Paint 3 – 2012…The End?
City Paint 6.2 – Progress Report on “Becoming”
If you’ll scroll back to “City Paint 6.1 – Becoming,” you’ll see the first two weeks’ progress on this western-themed mural that happens to be on the wall that encloses a parking lot behind a gun store, of all things. This is the third installment of the mural’s progress, the first two being covered in the earlier post. By the amount of work that’s been done since the last set of shots, it looks like it might be completed during this next week.
The first three shots are the three panels of the mural that are similar to the photos from the earlier post, presented in order from left to right.
And the final four photos are close-ups of the significant pieces of the mural, offered to show greater detail of the work….
City Paint 7 – Salt Lake Running Company
I pass this business every afternoon on my way home from work. It was one of the inspiring murals that prompted me to start this City Paint series…a local business that used street-art type advertising on the side of their building. You can check-out the Salt Lake Running Company’s website by clicking on their name, if you’re interested…otherwise, I hope you enjoy their building art.
City Paint 6.1 – Becoming
In the same alley where we visited and found the murals in City Paint 4 – Tucked-Away Alley-Way, there are the beginnings of another mural. I discovered it last week and visited it again this weekend and found that significant progress has been made. If you look at the third photo in the Tucked-Away series, you can see the blank wall at the far left of the shot. That is where this mural is coming to life. I will be returning weekly to monitor the progress.
These first three shots are from last weekend…
The last three shots are from this weekend…
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City Paint 5 – Ironclad Tattoo
Can’t help but see this one on my way to work each morning. This is on the side of Ironclad Electric Tattooing‘s building on South State Street in Salt Lake City, Utah.
City Paint 4 – Tucked-Away Alley-Way
A few months ago, I shared this photograph in my post “In the Heart of the City.”
What I didn’t know at the time, was that there is an alley-way at the bottom of this large sacred-heart mural that leads to a street-artists’ den. Imagine my surprise…
I have presented the photos in the order in which you would encounter the art-work as you entered the alley. The work is on the right-hand wall and continues for almost an entire 360 degrees as you pass into and back out of the alley. Hopefully that makes sense. I think you’ll be able to follow the works, as many of the photos will contain pieces or edges of the neighboring images. This is a longer post, but there were many images to capture and share. I hope you enjoy them.
This is Dakota. He said it was ok for me to take photos of the alley-way and explained that this is not a formal gallery, but just a collection of work from some local graffiti/street-art artists.
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City Paint 3 – 2012…The End??
This one is almost too much…from the side of the Korner Market…350 S. State Street, downtown Salt Lake City…. The first two photos are the left and right sides of the huge mural, and the following six shots are close-ups of the more significant parts…certainly thought-provoking, in addition to being an amazing work of art.
I was so taken with my “discovery” of the mural that I had forgotten to get the name of the business and exact address…so I had to make a return trip to collect that info. When I went back, I found that the bottom half of the mural had been blackened-out…covered…in only four or five days from when I shot these photos. I went into the store to see who I might find who could explain what was going on with the mural. I found a young man behind the counter, Oz, who told me that the whole mural is covered and replaced every year…has been for the last four or five years now. Each time they have it replaced, the graffiti artist Kier re-paints the whole thing…with spray cans of paint. The murals usually contain a message…ideas submitted by store customers, neighboring businesses, the Korner Market owners, and Kier himself. The subject matter for the present mural is 2012…with the intertwined concerns of the Maya prediction about the ending of life as we know it, politics, UFOs, and society in general. You’ll notice the three-headed image of Greenspan, Obama, and Bush…alien experimentation…and frightened masses.
Oz told me that I should return to the mural in another two or three weeks…said Kier usually takes a couple of weeks to complete everything. He also said that he and Kier were just going over drawings for the next mural…and that it is going to be even bigger and better than this one…grander in scale.
City Paint 2 – 27th Street Gallery
On the corner of 2700 South and West Temple, in Salt Lake City, one can find the 27th Street Gallery. Their parking lot is separated from the neighborhood by a four to five foot wall that runs the entire length of the parking lot. It appears that the gallery sponsored a street-art exhibition with the Univeristy of Utah in 2011 and donated their parking-lot wall to be used as the canvas. I’m not an art historian, but my daughter-in-law has a degree in the subject and shared with me that these renderings are of renowned works…but with a little something missing…something left-out of the works, apparentl,y so as not to infringe upon copyright holdings…or something of the sort. Or maybe it’s so that the murals can be back-drops for portraits, as you might notice a painted set of foot-prints near the bottom of several of the pictures…where one might stand to be the focus of the mural and have their photo taken…maybe.
City Paint 1 – 5 Monkeys Bar
I stumbled across this little bit of building art a couple of weeks ago. It got me to thinking about all of the building and street art that I have noticed in our city over the past several months. I’ve seen tagging and “normal” graffiti in other cities where I’ve lived, but the Salt Lake area has offered something new (to me, anyway), in that various businesses adorn their outer and street-facing walls with murals and tag-like art-work as advertising. Having seen many examples of this particular art-form, I thought it might be interesting to share a little series of my findings.
My daily commute to work, my lunch-time wanderings near my down-town work location, and my Saturday morning explorations have become intentional scouting trips since my first serendipitous discovery of this unique building art on the back-side of the 5-Monkeys Bar in Murray, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City.
The monster within….
We hear you walking the night-time stairs, that slight rustle of cloth on air, your fingertips on banister rails, opening doors and going where others would not, where things go missing after the setting sun…chemicals coursing through your veins, numbing your heart to what shouldn’t be…ink in your skin, rose in your hair, and a sheen on your lips that guard the abyss where you hide your cloven tongue…who are you behind those sparking eyes and pretty smile…do we know the real You?
Found on the side of a State Street tattoo establishment south of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
