Temporary Masterpieces
Mark K June 9th, 2007
What’s the purpose of covering a city street with beautiful, rich pastel chalk paintings, only to scrub the street clean two days later?
This weekend marks the 14th annual Italian street painting festival in my hometown of San Rafael, California and every year I ask myself this question. The tradition, imported from Italy, involves everyone from first-time amateurs to talented professional artists. For a few dollars, you and I can even purchase a square along with a box of colored chalk, and create our temporary masterpiece.
I’m always amazed at the quality of the artwork. Many of the professional artists recreate works by the masters, and to my eye, they look every bit as polished as the original. I always like to stroll down the street on Sunday night when everyone is finished, save a few artists kneeling on pieces of cardboard, covered from head to toe with smudges of chalk.
Then I return on Monday, only to find faint traces of what was there; the street-sweeping machines have already done their job in the middle of the night. I’m always left wondering why, after all of that hard work, the city couldn’t leave the impressive results for the citizens to admire for a week or two.
In his book Immortality, Milan Kundera writes about the difference between a road and a highway. A road is something on which we walk, noticing and enjoying what we pass along the way. A highway is a line connecting two points that we follow in our car in order to reach a destination or a goal. The highway is a metaphor for how we rush to complete goals without taking time to notice our surroundings.
It’s fitting that the chalk artwork is applied to the street - a street that has been closed to traffic so that we can stroll and observe, speak with the artists, and even cover ourselves and our patch of road in chalk, if we so choose.
It’s a great gift that we’ve been given - to forget about the destination, the permanent piece or art, and lose ourselves on the road for a few hours, returning home with a little chalk dust on the soles of our feet.
