Cimitero e Burano e Shepard Fairey

Just a note about my daily life: If anyone wants to Google Map my location: I am staying in the Foresteria Fondazione Levi. This hotel is next to the Rio San Vidal, next to the Ponte d'Accadémia, a major vaporetto stop on the Canale Grande in the San Marco neighborhood. Basically I am staying in the heart of Venice, about 15 minutes away from both San Marco and the Rialto Bridge.

Yesterday we stopped by Burano, a small island north of Venice that used to be a major fishing town, but now caters to tourists looking to buy lace, its main commodity. For my bookbinding class we will be making books based on the lace of that island and its history.

However, afterwards a bunch of us took the vaporetto to the cimitero, or main cemetary for the islands. The cemetary is beautiful with the tall trees throughout the island. The graves are a combination of above ground tombs in rows, similar to those of New Orleans, and then older graves classically dug. Igor Stravinsky and Ezra Pound are both buried there with their wives. Joseph Brodsky's grave had quite a few flowers on his. Many graves had photographs of the people buried on the tombstone, some almost 100 years old, still intact. Almost every grave had brightly colored flowers in a vase built into the tombstone. Despite the fact that they were clothflowers, it still added to emotions felt. While walking around the area, I got chills running up and down my back once I spotted a grave of a boy born 1988, and died at the age of 7 in 1995. If alive, he would be exactly my year. Visiting graveyards is strange, especially because the practice of permanently marking graves for commoners seems like a relatively new tradition. I must admit that it is quite possible that I prefer the act of burying someone without a marking or stone that would last more than 100 years. Almost everything we walk upon has been created because something else died there, a natural cycle. Marking the graves is a good thought to commemorate the person who has passed, but more for the people close to those people to celebrate their life and be comforted by their fellow mourners. However, marking graves for every person who died does not seems natural to me for some reason. That person's life will be remembered through the ripple effect of the people they interacted with. Is that not enough? I guess this was brought up especially because of the old photographs and flowers that looked as if they were recent, as if the graves of these people who passed over 100 years ago were still kept up. Anyway, enough with that.

In another thought sequence, I watched Shepard Fairey (with four assistants ranging from 18 yrs to about 30 yrs old) install a board in Campo San Margherita. He used a combination of wheat paste and matte medium to install it. They took these huge brushes (mop cleaning type brushes) and quickly installed a series of screen prints in the Shepard-Fairey-esque way onto a rectangle (6' x 20') wooden panel. It was really interesting to watch these five guys work together to paste it up between noon and 13h30 (1.30 pm). I was fortunate enough to observe it from start to finish, as they arrived a little late and I had some reading with me so I grabbed a bench and killed some time until they got there. The Italian channel 13 had a young guy recording the installation and the crowd gathered around. All the supplies of sheets to post, tape, etc. were kept in a traditional deep purple suitcase. It was windy, which made working a bit more difficult. After the entire installation, Fairey was pretty open about people speaking with him. I walked up and got his signature on the back of stickers that were being handed out in black, with the signatures/tags of the four other assistants in dark blue marker. After talking to one of the assistants I found out that the youngest, Spencer, was the actual baby on the Nirvana cover for their first album way back when. Another, Nick, had gone to college in Florida for printmaking for undergrad, where he met Fairey and started working in his studio screenprinting. Z had made stickers online (or ordered them...not sure which) from Fairey for a long enough time that he eventually met him and started working with him. I am not sure what the story of the fourth, Dan, who seemed like one right hand was, but probably along those lines. Anyway, it was a really great experience to meet and talk with these people. Even just watching a person work, which I have now done on three different days (paper maker, paper marbler, and street artist), is fascinating. When printing, I get into a specific zone of concentration that serves as a comfortable place for me (hence my focus in it). These three (or eight including these assistants) all as makers probably have a similar experience-to an extent, obviously depending on what they are doing.

All in all, my days are packed and fascinating. Now that I have regular computer access in the classroom for my Art History class, I will be writing longer blogs because this is also my personal recording of what happened every day. Also, as the classes pick up I will be doing more in the studio and less out in the street. Just to give you a heads up!

Buona sera!