Paint PHX Showcase Celebrates Mural Artists In The Valley
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You’ve probably seen colorful portraits and surreal landscapes popping up on Phoenix walls and buildings over the past several years. Street artists have turned a once rebellious act into a medium that Phoenix has come to celebrate and local businesses pay for.
Paint PHX is a mural art showcase happening Thursday through Sunday. It's the 2nd annual event that draws artists from all over the Southwest who come to work on individual or collaborative projects, with styles varying from graffiti to traditional portraiture.
Andy Brown is a Phoenix artist painting an expansive Mural near the intersection of Central and Highland.
"It’s roughly 150 feet wide by about 14 feet tall," he said. "It’s on the backside of an establishment at 4,700 north Central."
With the help of some friends and about 20 gallons of acrylic paint, the once barren wall is now several shades of light blue and a few cactus are popping up as Brown creates a desert scene.
"What I'm really trying to reflect in this work is the Arizona landscape in an abstract kind of way," he said. "I'm trying to point reference the fact that saguaros should be blooming right now. March to April. So all these saguaro cactuses are blooming. It’s a top view mural, so the shadows are supposed to show you that it's 4:30 in the afternoon because that’s right before the sun sets, the best part of the day."
The owners of the property contracted Andy to paint this particular mural. They get a beautified property and Brown gets a very visible public canvas for his art in addition to his payment. It’s a practice he said is becoming more common around town.
"I think it just shows the evolution of the city of Phoenix and also of art becoming more attractive to people," Brown said. "We’ve learned to do a lot of things — market, sell or reproduce — and now we want to see originality so that’s where art comes in, ya know, the ecosystem if you well has become more ripe and there's more players and people are feeding off each other and inspiring each other, it's cool. It's neat to see and it's fun to be a part of it too."
You can be a part of Paint PHX. Artists will be working on murals all over the city with a lot of activity taking place on Roosevelt Row. Go to PaintPHX.org for photos and a map of all the mural sites.
