Street art
Some years ago, my wife Teresa and I rented an apartment in Amsterdam. I had spent some time in the city in the 1980s. We traveled there together often in the years that followed. We love the culture and the people. We wanted a base for traveling around Europe, Africa and the Middle East, but also a place where we were comfortable living like locals. For about a year and a half, we split our time between the US and the Netherlands.
One of the first things we did when we moved into our new place was begin to explore our neighborhood and the broader city.
Discovering the Straat Museum
We’re both huge fans of street art. On one of our exploratory outings, we stumbled across a new museum called Straat. That’s the Dutch word for “street.” The exterior walls of the museum have a whole bunch of large-format street art, including a striking portrait of Anne Frank. It’s on the NDSM island, across the water behind the Central Station. We’d come over to visit a flea market. After shopping for a bit, we decided to stop by the museum before catching the ferry back home.
It was amazing! The museum has a huge collection of commissioned works by talented street artists. The pieces are billboard-sized. The warehouse it’s in used to be a shipbuilding facility, so it’s enormous, a big open space two and a half stories tall, with room to display dozens of those works simultaneously. It instantly became on of our favorite museums in the world.
We went back to visit a lot. The curators circulate pieces they have in storage out for display regularly, so what’s hanging in the space changes weekly. Besides that, they continually commission new works by artists, so you often get to see folks working on new pieces. Given their size and complexity, most of them take days or weeks to paint. You can watch them unfold if you come back over several days.
A brief Vermeer interlude
In the springtime of 2023, the Dutch national museum, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, assembled the largest collection of work by Johannes Vermeer ever to be shown in one place. It was a big deal in the art world that year.
Vermeer’s most famous work is The Girl with the Pearl Earring:
Because we were local, we were able to see the exhibition several times. We loved it! Vermeer iconography showed up all over Holland that year. Copies of and variations on the Girl with the Pearl Earring were especially popular.
Back to the Straat
In May of 2023, on one of our visits to the Straat Museum, we met an American artist who was working on a new commission for the collection. Elle had had a great deal of success over the course of her career and had been invited by the curators to paint a piece for display there.
We got to watch that piece come together over several days.
We spoke briefly with her during one of her breaks. We liked the piece so much that we made several trips over the days to watch her work. The final work is one of my favorite pieces in the Straat’s collection.
Berkeley
Our house in Berkeley is on a quiet street near a school. The road runs downhill toward our place, then bends and climbs to the corner that we live on. We’ve got a detached garage with a large wall that faces that street on its approach. I had always wanted to have a mural painted there — it seemed like a great place to share some art with the neighborhood.
After we got back to California in the fall of 2023, I contacted Elle to see if she took commissions. She did, and she regularly spent time in Northern California, not far from our place, so a project would be feasible. I was excited!
We ran the idea past our neighbors, who own the driveway and the brown wall along it in the photo above. They were not only supportive of us putting a mural on the garage — they offered to let us expand the canvas to include the wall along their driveway as well. We loved the idea and Elle was game.
Teresa is an avid gardener with a whole bunch of favorite plants. We decided on a floral theme for the mural. I wanted to acknowledge the history of the land and the Ohlone people displaced by the city and the University. Elle proposed a design, and we went back and forth a few times to refine it. The version we settled on included lots of lovely plants, including those that were important culturally and as food for the Ohlone. We wanted as well to include some Ohlone cultural artifacts so made space for a woven basket that, we hoped, would be representative of indigenous artists.
Elle used some generative AI software to compose and refine the piece. I liked that, of course. I have spent nearly fifty years writing software and working with computers. The idea of artists using computational tools as part of their creative processes really works for me.
Here’s the design we settled on before she got down to painting.
It’s a huge piece with so much color and detail! We were excited for Elle to get started painting.
Putting the art on the wall
Choosing some AI software to work with, and writing good prompts, then revising and refining the result iteratively, require real technical skill. But the hard part about painting is, obviously, painting!
Elle did this work exclusively with spray cans. It’s just shocking to me how she produces such realistic results, colors fading into one another so subtly, rendering such sharp lines with one can at a time in her hand. Rather than give you a prose narrative of the work, I’ll just show you the piece as it progressed over several weeks.
I’d pressure-washed and primed the wall as necessary so it’d take the spray paint before Elle arrived. On her first morning on-site, she unloaded bunch of plastic bins full of spray cans from her car and lined them up in front of the surface she was going to paint.
Late in the day, progress! Parts of some succulent plants have appeared on the wall. There are big loopy swirls and streaks in different colors elsewhere. It’s honestly hard to see how that’s all going to turn into the design we discussed, though!
Elle concentrated on the left side of the painting for the first few days, putting in the plants from the design. This surface was reachable from the ground, so simplest to do first. You can see that while the plants are rendered, they’re not yet detailed. The fern leaves, for example, are just bright green with none of the edging or veining that real plants have.
The right side of the wall is where the California native plants important to the Ohlone people dominate the composition. Strawberries, for example, were a local food source. There’s one at the bottom of the wall in this section.
Over the course of a week or so, Elle mostly finished the lower section of the painting, on the originally-brown wall that runs along the driveway. The plants are painted in and detailed, and the color is just wonderful. There’s a blank spot in the lower right, where the woven basket from the design is meant to go — more on that later!
The wall of the detached garage is above that, and is still unpainted in the photo above. The driveway slopes downward beneath that wall, so it’s tough to place a ladder there, and it’s too tall to reach just by standing on the ground.
A hydraulic lift will solve that problem, though! We rented one from a local supplier for a week. It got delivered early one morning.
Elle rigged a patio umbrella onto the frame to protect her from the sun and got busy. As for the wall below, it was astonishing to watch the rough swirls and shapes turn into such realistic detailed renderings of plants.
Not long afterward, the mural was nearly complete!
On the upper left, painted on the garage wall, you can see that the night sky shows the moon and, if you look closely or zoom in, also the constellation Orion. That’s my favorite constellation, and late in the process I asked Elle to add it. She was able to do that with no trouble, of course!
On the lower right part of the painting, the blank spot for the Ohlone basket still hasn’t been painted in. We had hoped to recruit an Ohlone artist from the community to collaborate with us on that, but weren’t able to find one for the project. We chose to postpone working on that part while we continued to work, and while we considered our options.
The mural remained like that, nearly finished, for a few months. During that period, one of our good friends and neighbors passed away at home. She had been an avid birder, participating regularly in bird counts and trekking all over California and the rest of the world to see birds in their native habitats.
One of her favorite species was the golden-crowned sparrow. As a tribute to our friend, we decided to replace the basket in the original design with one of them. It fit well with the indigenous species in that part of the painting, and would be a nice remembrance of someone that folks in the neighborhood really cared about and liked.
Elle came back and, in a few hours, painted in a fantastic representation of the bird. She’s such a talented artist, but it’s just astonishing to me how she can free-hand in so realistic an animal.
And with that, we were done! Elle signed the work in the very top left corner.
We’re so happy with how this turned out. We get lots of nice comments from folks walking by and who live in the neighborhood. It was great to work with such a talented artist. And now, when I walk home from shopping or other errands, I watch the mural unfold, from the bright sunflower visible from way up the street until the whole thing appears as I reach the corner.
It’s just magical.
