Try to imagine a brick wall. The bricks are all cemented together up high. The walls are taller than a person, but nowhere near as tall as a building. But the bricks aren’t the normal crimson red color that my house is built from. The column of bricks is painted in different hues of blues, purples, and blacks. Instead of looking rough, coarse, and ragged like bricks usually do, the wall looks like a galaxy. Dusted with some white paint, you really do feel like you are walking through another cosmos. On the top quarter of the wall, there are yellow dots scattered around. There are about 8 significantly sized polka dots, and on the right side there is a bigger yellow circle, that seems to represent the sun, while the smaller dots are stars. Beneath the “stars” is my favorite part of the mural. 

We all know what the stereotypical heartbeat echo looks like on a doctor’s screen. The red lines going up and down with sharp turns?

 

So yeah, there are 3 maximums, that mathematically speaking would be described as being concave down, and 2 minimum points, concave up. However, in the first section that goes up and down, instead of having a blank area, the area is shaped like a New York City building, perhaps the Empire State Building. The inner space has 17 yellow squares painted in it. A line of two squares at the uppermost, thinnest part is followed by 5 rows of 3 yellow squares underneath it. Under the “heartbeat monitor” is another yellow illustration. This time, the yellow represents the lines on the street, marking two different lanes. At the very bottom, painted in red, the artist left her instagram account @mapillustrations and a hashtag #BRICKFIT.

This mural is just one of the many murals painted outside of Fashion Institute of Technology on 28th street. Each student was given the same assignment, to paint a mural on a brick wall between 7th and 8th Avenues. Seeing this mural amongst all the others made the project come to life for me. If I just saw one mural I would have still thought it was cool, but seeing the multitude of artwork made it that much more special for me. Every mural is completely different, yet is still insanely beautiful and filled with so much talent. 

Walking into the Studio Fine Art Gallery  in Brooklyn was a completely different experience. The white walls were cluttered and filled with paintings from the floor to the ceiling. There was no room for the paintings to breathe and there was no order to the paintings. The gallery was stressful to look at. While the streets outside of FIT were orderly and each mural was the same size brick panel, the art gallery had paintings of all shapes and sizes, with all different themes too.

The painting that stood out to me the most at the gallery was this image. For starters, the painting is bare. There is no frame around the painting. The next thing I notice was the image of a tree. Imagine a wicked tree with branches coming out of it. The branches envelop the entire painting and the negative space created by the branches is colored in with different shades of blues throughout the leftmost side and the upper right quadrant has hints of yellow and gold leaves in the crevices. The branches loop and create the image of a mosaic window. The image looks like it could be printed on the stained glass window of a church or synagogue. It could symbolize the tree of life. The top of the image is rounded, just like how a window looks. The yellow/gold coloring looks like a glimmer of hope shining through the blue, gloomy, tree. This painting is much colder than the mural painting.

I definitely did not like this image as much as I enjoyed looking at the wall murals. Looking at this made me feel flustered and frustrated, because the room was not in any order. In order for me to enjoy looking at something it must be aesthetically pleasing. A disheveled art gallery does not give me peace of mind and therefore was not enjoyable for me. Had the art been organized, the gallery could’ve been beautiful.