Mamma Mia! Here’s a new one: What if a bunch of artists got together for a group show made up entirely of personal renditions of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? All media welcome. Could be a rollick and I said, “Sì Sì.”
Mona Lisa
Art in the Hellstrip
The Set-up: I live and maintain my studio in an impossibly old (1933) cottage facing what has, over the decades, become a main artery street in the charming beach village of Capitola, CA. I see lots of dogwalkers, strollers, bicyclists, joggers, skateboarders. Middleschool kids. Motorcycle groups. Lots of semi-lost out-of-townies. (How do you give directions to a lovely German-only-speaking gentleman and explain there are two separate Grace Streets and he’s on the other side of the creek from both of them? Give him a highlighted AAA map. Remember those?)
We endure a panoply of perennial foot and wheeled traffic clogs related to: school/church/concerts/festivals/races/Junior Guards/Surfing Santas/car shows/construction and nearby freeway tangles. Our place, built in a time of modest one-story homes on larger chunks of land, sits way back on a deep and angled lot, buffered by a front wildlands of Redwoods, Sword Ferns, Nasturtiums and Japanese Maples. And also by my growing ceramic sculpture garden! It’s cozy and generally feels far from the madding crowd. Yet the border between us and them is a porous one. Cue the ominous music.