Back to the Drawing Board Podcast Upsetting the Festival Status Quo, Pushing the Comfort Zone with Denise Kowal Emilija: I’m so excited for today’s episode with Denise Kowal. When we met for the first time in Florida last year she gave me a big hug and I actually still remember that. And I had never talked to her before. Anyways, Denise is the founder of the Sarasota International Chalk Festival in Florida and she has been an integral part of bringing artists from all around the world to invigorate the city since 2007. I was able to participate last year in my first ever chalk festival. I wanted to bring Denise on the podcast to talk about her motivation behind creating the festival and its power to alter the paradigm in fine art. D: Thank you for having me. E: Just last week or two weeks ago, I had a chat with Shawn McCann. I’m pretty sure you know him. D: Absolutely. E: We talked a little bit about chalk art and his work with Driscoll’s berry company. But we didn’t really touch on the history of chalk art. So I was hoping you could cover a little bit of that. D: I can certainly speak to what I’ve learned over the past 10 or 11 years that I’ve been in it. E: It’s a test. D: One thing that I know as I get older, is that the more you learn the less you seem to know. I also can only speak to what I know, I think one’s knowledge of history should only pop in. I think everybody should have an open mind to whatever they hear or learn about history and think. E: Definitely. How did chalk art make its way from Italy into the US? D: It was probably always in the US in some sense. But the most notable person was Sidewalk Sam. There were multiple people that had participated in a festival that started in Italy and people would come back. He seemed to be the most prominent person. He just recently passed away in 2015, actually where I am right now, in Boston, which is where I grew up. It’s kind of this is probably the area when people think of when they think of the US. Where it kind saw first people on the streets using chalk they would probably think of the Boston area. But the art form as we know it today in America was because of the incredible discipline and determination of an artist named Kurt Wenner, who’s an American artist. He had sold everything as a young man. He was attending college. He was even working for NASA before they had all the CAD drawings and all the computerization that they had now. He left all of that behind. He wanted to further his abilities as an artist, in the early 1980s he traveled to Rome. He self-trained in Renaissance classicalism drawings studying Masters throughout Europe. When he started the street painting in 1982, he started it to earn money. It was something that he had kind of just stumbled on, he had never really seen it before and he had stumbled on it. And he wanted to further his classical studies and he needed to make money, he was starving. Typical starving artist. And so, the first year that he started learning the pavement arts, he actually brought it to the United States. He introduced to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. By 1986 he started the first pavement art festival, I Modonnari. So that’s the first one that was really a true modennari that had started. He 1 Back to the Drawing Board Podcast Upsetting the Festival Status Quo, Pushing the Comfort Zone with Denise Kowal really is the sole person responsible for the quick spread of this ephemeral art form throughout the US soil. E: That’s really cool. So, from what I know, chalk art in Italy was centered on religious imagery and it was all rendered very classically. D: Classically might not be. A lot of these artists were novice. A lot of them were not trained classically. There were a lot of people that would win competitions that were starting to be trained in classical. When you think of Italian artists you tend to think of their classical style. That would be true. E: I know especially at the chalk festival in Florida and from images that I’ve seen on social media. Chalk art has kind of taken a different direction in the US. There is all of a sudden, the 3- dimensional aspect of it. How did that get started? D: There is two things going on. The first thing we talked a little bit about, did it start kind of in Italy and was it all around the religious imagery. In reality, while pavement art was all around the world and images were created by everyone. Because of course it’s very natural for people to draw wherever they could. So, through history people have probably always been drawing on the ground. E: That’s very true. D: There’s examples of many artists in other countries. Yes, Italy was the most significant and most of the images were a homage to the Madonna, the Saint Mary. It was all around the rich history of Italian religious art. Hence the name, these artists were called the I modonnaris. It’s also where the most significant pavement art festival started. That started because after World War II a lot of these artists were, they just were not being seen out in the street so much. This festival started to continue this art forma and bring it back to Italy. Kurt Wenner was involved quite a lot in that. What’s changed so much over time is probably the mediums, the surface, the subject matter and the techniques and the advancements over time. Most significantly as this art has flourished it was particularly the invention of anamorphic or 3d pavement art that Kurt Wenner did in 1984 and of course that was documented by National Geographic. His distortion, what he has invented is actually known as the Wenner geometry. He was inspired by the perspective format that was used by great European masters, anamorphicism, that gave ceilings the illusion of floating figures or endless skies and architectural elements. The Wenner geometry makes images appear to rise above and fall into the ground. This was on the surface. This was the first time that this has been known to appear anywhere in history, was by Kurt Wenner. It’s a very complex art form. It’s an outward projection of the curvilinear geometry of the back of your eye, is the Wenner geometry. Today of course there are many artists, you came to the festival and you saw that there were many artists that like to try pavement art and there’s a tremendous amount of very good artists that are out there creating the 3d art form today. But, and this is a very big but. Most teaching by others and videos and tutorials, and the works of artists, a lot of them are not necessarily correctly done or in the right technical sense. Although they can still be fun and beautiful and they are creating a beautiful work of art, other 3d pavement artists have 2 Back to the Drawing Board Podcast Upsetting the Festival Status Quo, Pushing the Comfort Zone with Denise Kowal simplified the geometry by using kind of traditional 17-century approaches. Which calls for the creation of an interface between two perspective planes. One that uses the surface of the pavement as a reference plane, and another one that corresponds on a film plane of a camera or optical device. The cleverness and significance of the use of the geometry and by extension mathematics kind of lies in the artist’s ability to conceptualize and execute works by juxtaposing these two forms of pictorial representations. This art form is of course still relatively new, it’s really only been around for 25 years. It’s still blossoming. It’s in high demand. Lots of artists are practicing it and learning stuff, which is the reason why we still as our festival we continue to have Kurt Wenner keep coming back to our festival to keep working with artists so that he can keep helping them understand perspective and advance their knowledge of this art form which will continue to help their artwork grow over time. E: Right. I knew it was complicated but I didn’t realize there was all of this science and math involved in it. D: Yeah. It’s, we see lots of people that try to explain it in books, or they try to explain it in videos, and they just of kind of jumble up a bunch of stuff. It really doesn’t do the art form justice. It’s very complicated. It can be simplified of course. You know, but then of course the dimension, and what your eye will see, will be more simplified as well. E: So, I know I stumbled upon chalk art when I was googling mural and art festivals last year after graduating. How did you get involved with street art? D: Well I come from a family of artists. My parents are artists. My father is also a college professor. He taught sculpting. We lived on college art campuses during the school year.