3D STREET ART

WHAT IS 3D STREET ART?

Street painting, also commonly known as pavement art, street art, and sidewalk art, is the performance art of rendering original and non-original artistic designs on pavement such as streets, sidewalks, and town squares with impermanent and semi-permanent materials such as chalk.

ORIGIN

The origins of modern street painting can be traced to Britain. Pavement artists were found all over the United Kingdom and by 1890 it was estimated that more than 500 artists were making a full-time living from pavement art in London alone.

The British term for pavement artist is "screever". The term is derived from the writing style, often Copperplate, that typically accompanied the works of pavement artists since the 1700s. The term screever is most commonly cited as Shakespearean slang dating from around 1500.

The works of screevers often were accompanied by poems and proverbs, lessons on morality, and political commentary on the day’s events. They were described as "producing a topical, pictorial newspaper of current event." They appealed to both the working people, who (on the whole) could not read or write, but understood the visual images; and to the educated members of the middle-classes who appreciated the moral lessons and comments. It was important for a screever to catch the eye of the ‘well to do’ and in turn attract the pennies donated for their efforts.

Street painters, (also called chalk artists) a name these performance artists are most commonly called in the United States are called I Madonnari in Italy (singular form: madonnaro or madonnara) because they recreated images of the Madonna. In Germany Strassenmaler (street: straßen, painter: maler).

FESTIVALS

In 1972 the first 'Italian' International Street Painting Competition was held in Grazie di Curtatone, Italy. It is part of a two-week festival celebrating the Assumption with the streets of the city being turned over to the festival.The first recorded street-painting competition and 'festival' was held in London in 1906.

In 1987, Wenner and Manfred Stader introduced street painting to Old Mission Santa Barbara, California.

One of the largest events in the United States is the Lake Worth Street Painting Festival, held in Lake Worth Florida. Started in 1994, it attracts 100,000 visitors over the weekend to see 250 works of art by over 400 artists

In 2012, A company called We Talk Chalk, lead by artists Melanie Stimmell, Julie Kirk, and Remco Van Latum, introduced the art of 3-D street painting to countries such as Israel and Thailand. The city of Chiang Mai hosted their first street painting festival in March 2012. To celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of Tel Aviv suburb Ramat Hasharon, Israeli and 8 International artists from 'We Talk Chalk' used 3-D chalk drawings to transform Bialik Street into an urban art compound. The festival had as many as 50,000 visitors, including Israel’s President Shimon Peres who posed with paintings by Melanie Stimmell and Ruben Poncia..