New York 2012 Street Art

Summer of 2012, for me was NY... 
Here are a few little gems that inspired me on that trip, some vernacular and some not so...

A Thought From Chuck

This little off the subject but I read this on a friend's facebook profile. It's a quote from the artist Chuck Close and one I found quite pertinent and relevant to many aspects of life not just art alone.

"Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere."

Too true...

Moon Rabbit

So I titled this blog Moon Rabbit on rather a whim...

It was the name of a "Love Hotel" I used to drive by regularly outside Niigata city in Japan- "Moon Rabbit". It was things like that in Japan that always used to make me smile. I also remember a service station with the name "Hello Square" like a bizarre yet joyful exclamation at the drivers arriving. In that same service station the bins for sanitary items in the ladies bathroom had written on the "Charm Box".... not exactly.... but again it made me smile.

This has got to be one of my favourites though

I went past this sign many times snowboarding thinking it was just another bizarre sign. 

Say "ABBA lunch control" as fast as you can (directly translated from Japanese katakana it is abaranchi not abba lunch)

When saying an English word in Japanese B is used in place of V and R in place of L, so try avalanchi.... 

As you can see the sign is trying to say something quite important but it's either a joke or the translater/proof reader was relying on bad electronic translation tools!

My Japanese signs were to provide fodder for my creative pursuits later down the line.