Daniel Johnston is a singer/songwriter/artist and sufferer of bipolar disease. He painted this mural on the side of a store facing The Drag* fifteen years ago. (It was a secondhand music store called Sound Exchange at the time.) The mural has been preserved through store changes and is considered iconic by his fans. There was a documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, released in 2006 about him. There is a fan site I found for him.I like the picture because besides showing the stark black and white and simple lines of the preserved mural, the newspaper boxes (one conveniently toppled when I walked by) look like crayons ready to color it.
*The Drag is Guadalupe as it runs along the west side of the UT campus. You pronounce Guadalupe in Austin not in Spanish (Huadalupa) but GWAD-Loop or some such. Not that we don't know a lot of Spanish around here (we pronounce guacamole correctly about half the time) but for some reason street names have a pronunciation key all their own.
You're right about those newspaper boxes looking like crayons beside the mural. Great capture!
ReplyDeleteThat's some of the best graffiti (okay, mural) that I've seen in a while. Something about it's simplicity just works.
ReplyDeleteI know that one well!
ReplyDeleteAnd am a Daniel J. fan.
This is going to sound funny. Just for the heck of it I clicked on the "Austin" tag on Blogger, as I live in Austin and up popped your site's link.
Pretty cool.
I'm relatively new to blogging and loving it.
Nice to "meet" you!
Jannie
Nice to meet you as well-- pls. come back often.
ReplyDeleteGUADALUPE!(gwadalupay)! NOT huadalupa OR (gwadaloop) hahaha That really blew my mind when I moved to austin from MX.
ReplyDelete