Saturday, October 11, 2014

SE 3rd & Morrison Mural

The next mural on our tour is the new magic-snail-n-tentacles design near SE 3rd & Morrison, on the side of one of the City Liquidators buildings, across the street from the Montage. This was painted for the 2014 Forest for the Trees event by Philadelphia-based artist NoseGo. (Twitter: @nosego, Instagram: @nosego). An article at Bizarre Beyond Belief includes a bunch of photos of this mural, along with another NoseGo piece at Gigantic Brewing down near Reed College.

Maybe it's just that it's October right now, but I do like the part with the tentacles bursting through the wall, as if from another dimension. Contemporary public art in Portland is rather deficient in the eldritch horror department, and while this is a bit too cute and technicolor to qualify, it's at least a step in the right direction. Still, I know we can do better if we put our puny mortal minds to it. I'm pretty sure we could use a painting or a bust of Great Cthulhu for the library's rare and forbidden manuscript room, for one thing. Ok, technically it's just the "rare book and other special collections" room, but you know that's got to be a euphemism for forbidden manuscripts.

No comments :