Art Works by Jude Tulloch
Every city has its pain place. In Darwin there’s the man with no legs elevated in a shady doorway. There’s the bus driver constantly glancing apprehensively in his mirror at the back of the bus where a drunk disheveled woman directs angry shouts like blows at a man in the group.
Decorative birds defining doorways in the CBD of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.
Paddington Sydney
How lucky to find myself in Marrakesh during the Biennale in 2016. I came across this installation at an intersection while checking out local galleries in the suburb of Gueliz.
The Zbel Manifesto Collective of four artists from Marrakesh comment here on something close to my heart, a concern about the proliferation of plastic, or at least that is what their work says to me, though no doubt the French explanation tells more.
It would be impossible to go for a walk and pick up plastic along the highways in Morocco; you would never reach your destination.
Sadly the white flecks along this dry creek bed are plastic bags, not stones. We have yet to come to grips with the environmental consequences of plastic, that 20th Century wonder material.
I keep finding gifts in the op shop for the mysterious woman in the wide brimmed who is spray painted on the wall of a building in Casablanca. She has now taken up temporary residence on my bookshelf. A frame, a heart, a mirror and a flower surround her like a shrine. Her creator painted a rose and a heart ever so deftly in the left hand corner of his homage to his absent love.
… letters not blogs. I noticed this vibrant street art of an alert feline outside a cafe whilst lunching in Rabat. Little did I know that the artwork decorated an otherwise mundane, and purely functional element of the urban landscape.
“And you can tell everybody, that this is your song”
Like Elton John the street artist wrote down the words to the world of his love, but used a spray can instead of a song. My photo missed the tag so the artist remains anonymous, like the woman to whom he offers a heart and a rose. Anonymous these two may be, the visible and invisible, yet they express something very intimate and personal described by artists, poets and musicians down through the centuries. (For in my mind, he is a Romeo, and here is his Juliette).
There’s an exhibition of street art entitled Bansky and Co on display in Bologna right now, but that’s not the subject of this blog – more on that later.
I couldn’t walk past this whimsical little addition to a peeling wall in the university district of central Bolonga, just across the road from an equally characterful bar where I stopped for a coffee.
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I took this photo in the Castello district of Venice because it resonates. So many people make art, often not even recognising their own artistic sensibility. This is my homage to all those unrealised artists. May you one day recognise, claim and acknowledge your creativity, however it expresses itself.
