Street Painting — Festa Sulla Strada
DONNALEE DUNNE . . . artist
STREET PAINTING -- Festa Sulla Strada June 1, 1997
I was invited along with about a dozen other people to participate in Festa Sulla Strada, an Italian street painting festival for the grand opening of Fontana Selfini, a gated community.
Street painting began a couple centuries ago in an Italian village. The tradition has kept alive and spread around the world. The activity is actually a performance art, typically done from beginning to end within one day. Each artist is given a portion of the sidewalk or street. We had a 12' x 8' area each. There is a master artist, usually one well known for the medium who paints a larger area. Conrad Jimenez was the master artist at Festa Sulla Strada.
In preparation, I had drawn a cartoon of my idea to scale, and layed out the street drawing the previous evening. June 1st was a beautiful day - not too warm, not too windy. I arrived at sunrise to begin. A few residents were already living in the complex and stopped by during the early hours to observe. By late moring the street was filled with onlookers, Italian street musicians were playing, balloons were hanging in the trees. Part of the painting activity is to talk with and react with the observers. The are a vital part of the process, as a performance between painter and the viewer.
I put on layer after layer of pastels, rubbing each layer lightly with a piece of upholstery foam to blend and keep it sticking to the pavement. A slight breeze can take away any details if applied too early. The idea of the entire operation is to complete the painting just as the festival ends. By the next day the wind, along with any rain, or passing cars obliterates the remains.
The brilliant colors I chose that day influenced much of my later work. I had already done the Coso landscapes in acrylic, and originally planned to cover more of the pastels with soft blues as I had done in the paintings. But the more I saw of the reds and yellows and pinks forming the rocks, the more I left these colors. This tonality carried into the oil paintings I began a couple months later (see Gallery 4).