Bring Art to the Streets!
As a visual storyteller artist, I use sequential art, combining images and texts to tell a story, to share ideas, to convey messages. Through my graphic novels, comic books and illustrations, I document culture and language, helping people remember the past as a way to understand the present, and care for the future. Looking at the artists creating wonderful chalk paintings and sharing their process with the public, at the annual Italian Street Painting event in Palo Alto, I was reminded of all of us onlookers doing something similar in the streets of our childhood. I grew up in a big city where exterior staircases are a notable architectural feature. In the sunny summer days, all over the city streets, children walked down those stairways to create artwork made out of chalks. Sidewalks provided infinite canvasses. In this piece I wanted to capture this childhood memory that is also a reminder that the experience of art should be available to everybody, everywhere. Daniele Archambault