My new stencil wall in Venice Ca 7×15 feet wide is my personal tribute to the legend David Bowie.
This Bowie’s wall is, first of all…Bowie himself…in front a wall.
Against the wall of the Rochester Police Station, few days after his infamous arrest in New York for allegedly possession of Marijuana, (together with his old times buddy Rockstar Iggy Pop).
His “stylish dry” ordinary but also very elegant image in real life is superimposed by his stage persona, Ziggy Stardust…it’s there to symbolize fantasy overcoming reality. Which was one of the main points of Bowie’s career, strongly establishing the power of imagination over everyday’s life with his groundbreaking and trendsetting music and art.
The visual style I have decided to use here is similar to the layers effect in Photoshop, a tool of which I was personal inspiration and contribution in the ’90s when ( while in its earlier version) I was using the CMYK channels to overlap different pictures…some of the folks working at Adobe back then saw my work and they had the great intuition of adding the layers feature to the software. ( I was introduced to Apple and Adobe from Mac Guru and legendary broadcast designer Harry Marks, and later the same people in the person of Tim Myers showed me the new version of Photoshop with the layers, while in Kauai, where I was a speaker, during an AFI American Film Institute conference in 1992)
The way the two portraits of Bowie overlap over each others also tend to resemble the many face make ups the Thin White Duke adopted through out his long standing chameleon career and all of his changes of characters and personalities.
The colors of the mural are Blue and Red over White, like the colors of Bowie’s original country British flag but also the American, as in his adopted home and place of the arrest .
This stencil produced wall will also be a stand in picture opportunity, given space to people to pose in front or in between their favorite hero’s portraits.
