March 28, 2008
The Artful Garager
If you're thinking about Space Invaders right now, you probably spent too much time in the arcades of the early 1980s. But according to homeowner Eugene Popov, the inspiration for this colourful garage door wasn't a youth spent feeding quarters into game consoles; it was a few years living in South Africa.
He took the motif from the Ndebele people of northern South Africa, who are renowned for their distinctive traditional house painting with repeating geometric patterns and bright colours. After coming to Toronto, Popov wanted a little something to remind him of his former home. So why did he choose the garage door as the canvas for his remembrance? "I had a rusty garage door," he explained, "and wanted to do something different." Indeed.
Photo by Val Dodge.
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I thought this was today's Vandalist at first.
Neat.
Too aesthetically pleasing to be vandalist.
David Topping will be the first to cover the story with wails of praise when this is defaced.
I mean, that's what vandalist is right? An article about defacing property?
I like his garage door better than mine: http://ok2passenge.blogspot.com/2008/02/wiki-style-editing-in-back-alley.html
Is he for hire???
That's too bad.
I suppose I was thinking more in terms of this:
http://www.eltono.com/img/espana/big/esp82.jpg
You're fishing, matty, and I'm not biting.
This is terrific, beautiful stuff.
I like it, clean and bold.
Hope it holds up well.
Are there any measures taken to protect it from weathering and deterioration? I'd like it more if I knew that was going to last.
The owner said that it's two or three years old. It looked virtually brand new to me so I think it's holding up pretty well.
But of course, Torontoist will applaud someone who paints over this piece of private property as long as whatever the asshole paints is really, really cool.
Because according to you guys, everybody has the right to paint anything they want anywhere they want.
But of course, if anyone else but the property owner had painted this you'd be saying it's ugly and of no artistic merit.
Because according to you guys, beauty is determined by ownership.
Again, if someone were to paint something beautiful over top of this guy's garage (that he spent a great deal of time to paint himself), he'd be rightfully upset, because it's his fucking garage, not the asshole graffiti guy's. How can you not understand can this simple, simple concept? Maybe your Che T shirt is on too tight.
"How can you not understand can this simple, simple concept?"
Because he's not a homeowner. The day he is the day he stops finding graffiti so beautiful. Particularly when it's his house that has been spraypainted over.
Boy, some of you anti–street art people really do everything you can to make yourselves look bad.
I don`t see how the anti-graffiti group, of which I`m a proud member, has made themselves look bad with any of the previous statements.
I am however, interested in hearing how you arrived at that conclusion.
The key word in my comment is that "some" people against street art are making themselves look bad; Ad hominem attacks and unbelievable and unrealistic hyperbole don't really help any cause. Here are just a few examples—you'll notice that it's pretty much the same few people fishing for a fight, people who, in doing so, are really doing a disservice to their side of the argument.
That said, I'm really not interested in getting into a fight over Vandalist here, and I hope that this comment thread doesn't continue as one. Except for in the minds of a few people desperately trying to draw a connection between destruction of this piece of art, and the art that has been featured and will be featured on Vandalist, Vandalist really has absolutely nothing to do with this.
davedave - Your reply really doesn't make sense. Nobody, as far as I'm aware, has ever said property owners can't or shouldn't get upset about it. Reply in the Vandalist comments if you must.
tyrannosaurus_rek -
You applaud "beautiful" street art painted without permission on private or public property but in the same breath you agree property owners should be upset about the damage to their property. But you'd rather have the unauthorized art than not have it, so apparently property owners just have to suck it up because people like you want to enjoy a stupid picture of a robot or someone's nickname in 3D letters.
Vandalist has everything to do with this piece of art, because despite this garage being a piece of private property, pro-graffiti people believe it's just another surface and therefore they have the right to deface it if they please, which is fucking ridiculous, immature and illegal.
"Reply in the Vandalist comments if you must."