St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN)
June 2, 2006
Section: Local
Edition: St. Paul
Page: B1

STREET IS THEIR CANVAS
THESE MASTERS OF CHALK BRING ART TO THE MASSES AS THEY TRANSFORM A CITY BLOCK.
MATT PEIKEN, Pioneer Press
Drop Tracy Stum and others like her in front of some pavement and, like ants in a thin glass case, it's pretty easy to predict what they will do.
Within moments of descending on downtown St. Paul on Wednesday morning, Stum and other street painters had staked out squares of Market Street in front of Landmark Center and begun chalking the brick with color.
"It does get a little overwhelming going from festival to festival, but once I get on the street, I just get in the zone," Stum says.
Stum, from Ventura, Calif., had never been to Minnesota before her invitation to the annual Flint Hills International Children's Festival. She and about a dozen other street painters from across the country are turning this tiny stretch of Market Street, which rarely seems open to motorized traffic, into their canvases through the weekend. When the festival ends, so does the artwork; street cleaners will wash it away.
"People ask about that all the time. The first couple you do, it's hard to let go," said Rod Tryon, who stepped into street painting while he lived in Santa Barbara, Calif., considered the epicenter of the art form in this country. Tryon now lives in Long Island, N.Y.
"Now I see it almost like performance art -- bringing the art form to the crowd," he said. "We see this as a gift to the people."
"It's not about the finished piece. It's the making of the piece, the process," Stum says. "It's the sharing with the people and the bond I have with the other artists that makes this special."
It's a misnomer calling Stum, Tryon and the others here street painters -- they work, instead, with hundreds of waxy sticks of pastel chalk, spanning the color wheel, packed into plastic chests. Few of them create wholly original art. Most pull photos or illustrations of famous and not-so-famous works, draw grid patterns over them and then magnify that grid by drawing thin chalk lines onto the pavement. From there, they crouch, kneel, squat and even lie on the pavement, often on small foam pads, and do their best to re-create the nuance of color and shading of the original, smearing and blending colors with their hands.
On Market Street, Tryon is recreating a 1930 art deco painting by Tamara de Lempicka called "Young Lady With Gloves." Early on, he erased his mistakes by dragging the sole of his flip-flop over yellow chalk lines. When he's finished, the drawing will be rich with greens.
Next to him, Kim Baxley and Jared Wiechert, who run a graphic design business in Goshen, Ind., worked together to re-create a portrait of the artist Frida Kahlo, Baxley concentrating on some adornment to Kahlo's dress while Wiechert smoothed out the black in her hair.
The most challenging part of the process, the artists say, is lengthening the scale of the upper portion of the artwork, to account for the perspective of people looking at the art from the base.
"When you're working in a studio, you can just feel so isolated," said Stum, who makes her living as a commissioned muralist and designer. "But here, people will stay and watch me develop the face, something with a lot of detail, and watch it come to life. I do the same thing. I'll walk around and stare at what other artists are doing and just get lost in it."
Matt Peiken can be reached at mpeiken@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5440.
To learn more
The sixth annual Flint Hills International Children's Festival runs through the weekend in downtown St. Paul. The event includes more than 110 indoor and outdoor performances. For more details, visit www.ordway.org/festival/schedule.asp.

3 PHOTOS: SCOTT TAKUSHI/PIONEER PRESS
1)Italian "Madonari" street artists draw pastel artwork Thursday on the brick street next to Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul as part of the Flint Hills International Children's Festival. Artist Tracy Stum is creating a tribute to Mozart, including these two characters, who are musicians in his opera "The Magic Flute."
2)Street painter Rod Tyron is using these pastels to re-create an art deco painting by Tamara de Lempicka called "Young Lady With Gloves."
3) Rod Tyron of Long Island, N.Y., worked on his copy of "Young Lady with Gloves." It will take him 25 hours to complete the artwork as part of the Flint Hills International Children's Festival, which runs through Sunday.

Copyright 2006 Saint Paul Pioneer Press