John Pugh 3D illusion murals

I have an aunt that sends the whole family emails, almost daily, with funny photos, puzzles, jokes, and occasionally interesting art pics. Today's email from her was a series of murals by John Pugh, in a style he calls Trompe L'oeil, which is French for optical illusion or something. Great stuff, check out the clip, or his website: John Pugh Murals.

Street Art in Shoreditch, England

Here's a really creative video I found showing street art and graffiti in Shoreditch, England. Pac Man anyone?

The Visual Libraries/Leave Your Mark project

These lovely ladies are Dr. Maureen O'Neill and Claire Sambrook of the Visual Libraries project in Portsmouth, England. I haven't figured out how English women got so tan. They must've had a good summer holiday.

For me, it started with a little display in the Winston-Salem central library. I was staying in a homeless shelter in W-S, theoretically looking for work, but really wondering what to do with my life. I wandered away from the BMX bike, skateboard, and TV industries in the mid-1990's. I wanted to get over my intense shyness and heal from the issues developed in a family that's a bit crazier than most. I worked odd jobs in Southern California, read a lot of books, wrote voluminously in journals, wrote poetry, and did a bit of drawing here and there and an occasional zine. Life didn't make sense to me, and I had a lot of really deep questions I wanted to answer before I moved on. I wound up a taxi driver in Huntington Beach, California, living in my cab and working 100 or more hours a week, struggling to survive. Every day I woke up in my cab, in a parking lot somewhere in Orange County, and my first thought was, "how can I make $200 today?" Taxi driving isn't a job, it's a business, a very, very competitive business. There was no time for creativity, I had to make money.

Then, in August 2005, a veteran driver who owned his cab offered me a deal. I would drive his taxi on the weekends, and during the week I could live in his indie art gallery. I needed a break, so I took the deal. I spent four and a half days each week literally surrounded by art made by several young SoCal artists. On my second night there, I drew a little drawing. Then it just blossomed. As a prolific poet, I tried to make big, hand drawn posters of my poems, drawn in marker. It was an idea I started a few years before. But markers looked really cheesy and amateurish when I colored the drawings in. So I played around with different ideas, and a style of overlapping colored scribbles emerged. It gave my marker drawings non-standard hues, and it also created a textured look, which I liked. I was barely making enough money to survive, even with my cheap rent at the gallery, but I had a lot of fun. The creative guy in me was reborn.

After seven months in the gallery, I went back to driving full time again. I struggled through a year and a half more, as business went down because of taxi company policies and then the recession. I finally walked away from taxi driving in late 2007, so overwieght I was barely able to walk. None of my family and friends would loan me money to get back on my feet. So I wandered out onto the streets of Orange County and lived for an entire year by panhandling. As horrible as that sounds, it was one of the best years of my life. I began to really enjoy life on a moment by moment basis. I went into bookstores and looked through street art books for hours. I sat in fast food restaurants and drew for hours. I tried to get a little sticker business going, selling stickers at a swap meet. I produced a one hour comedy video of myself about homelessness, entirely with panhandled money. I started writing and working out comedy material.

When I walked out on the streets, my health was so bad that I expected to die within two or three weeks. After six months, I realized that I was probably going to survive, and had to try to figure out how to get back into society. Unfortunately, my family had reported me missing, which put a big target on me with the police, as a homeless man. An uncle of mine made a call or two to business associates in Orange County. Apparently they pulled some strings to get the police to "encourage" me to leave California and move to North Carolina, where my family now lives. I knew I would have almost no chance of getting back on my feet in NC, especially with my family involved. The family that refused to help me out when I first need help several years before. Given the choice between homelessness in California and living with my family in North Carolina, I chose homelessness. The police chose North Carolina.

After being literally terrorized by police and sheriff's deputies for a year, I finally accepted a plane flight to NC. I got here in the depths of the recession, when jobs were really scarce. My mom was convinced I was mentally ill, and tried to force me into going on disability for the first seven months. One day I had just had enough. I packed a few things in my little day pack, and walked away from my parents apartment with three dollars in my pocket. I slept in an old graveyard that night, and scraped up enough for a bus ticket to Winston-Salem the next day. Why Winston-Salem? Because that's where the bus was going. I spent that first night in a patch of woods during a serious thunderstorm. Then next day someone told me about the homeless shelters, and I went to the Samaritan shelter.

Suddenly I was on my own again, and had a bed, and three free meals a day for three months. I had no money, and no idea what the hell to do next. Like many of the homeless people living in Winston-Salem shelters, I hiked a mile and a half to the library every morning. That became my ritual. One day I saw a little display by the front desk. It had a few blank journals that were actual library books. After looking at the journals for a couple of days, I asked a librarian about them, a woman named Candace Brennan. We had a good little chat, and she told me the project was called Leave Your Mark. Anyone could write, draw, or do whatever in the journals, and they would remain in the library collection. So I took the journal with the Winston-Salem theme, and drew a pen and ink drawing of a battered outhouse. Why an outhouse? It was just something I had learned to draw in high school, and I'd drawn dozens of them.

I checked the journal out, and did several more drawings, most in my color "scribble style" with markers. Then I forgot about the journals and wound up moving back in with my parents a couple m,onths later. With such a horrible job market, I tried to raise enough money to get the Ebay business idea going again. I wound up selling artwork to my niece's cheerleader friends and doing odd jobs instead. A year and a half after coming to North Carolina, I still don't have a job. I'm squeaking by, and every day I wake up almost ready to just hitchhike back to California. I take my frustration out in blogging since I'm a writer at heart.

Then last week, out of the blue, I got a cal from Candace the librarian, who I didn't remember ever talking to. She said some women from England liked my artwork in the journals in the W-S library. The women wanted to meet me. "Uh... OK. You sure you have the right guy?" I thought. The next day I had a long chat with Maureen and Claire, and learned that the Winston-Salem Library's Leave Your Mark project is an offshoot of Maureen and Claire's Visual Libraries project in Portsmouth, England. Unknowingly, I had drawn the first picture in the first journal of their project in the United States. Combined with my other drawings, they said I was the standout artist of the Leave Your Mark journals.

One day I get and odd phone call from a librarian. The next day I get interviewed by a couple of professors from England, and have a great chat with them. The next morning I do a phone interview with the Winston-Salem Journal, and that afternoon I found myself in an obscure room in the Wake Forest University library at a workshop with professors, art grad students, and librarians. I've never taken a single college course. The only time I ever spent on college campuses was street riding as a BMXer.

I don't know where this journal in the library idea will lead, but to me it seems like a no-brainer. Even in our smart phone, laptop, high-tech world, tens of thousands of people go to libraries every day. Many of them check out books. Why not let the creatively inclined people of every area CREATE a library book. How cool is that? My goofy little outhouse drawing will be sitting in the Winston-Salem library 30 years from now, barring theft or crazy circumstances. That's just plain freakin' cool. You can do whatever you want: draw, paint, collage, insert photos, crochet a bookmark, whatever. Personally I believe that everyone has some creative spirit, but most adults are afraid to let it out. We're conditioned to give that artsy stuff up as we grow up. Yet if you put art supplies and journals in front of a bunch of people who don't consider themselves artist, and you tell them it's OK to do whatever they want, they get downright giddy. Maureen and Claire have stumbled onto a brilliant idea here. OK, they're professors, they didn't "stumble" onto it, they observed a niche that was creatively unfulfilled, and they created a way to fill that niche and provide everyday people and trained artists with a place to share their thoughts and feelings with their communities.

The Visual Libraries/Leave Your Mark projects are the edge of a really big idea. I think we're going to see it go a lot further in coming years. I'm glad I stumbled into it.

My art # 6

Cigarette smoking alien drawing on the back of my number plate, 2010. This is drawn in my "scribble style," using Sharpie markers.

My art # 5

That's me on the bike. Wall ride over my sister's head at the Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, California in 1990. This is from my self-produced BMX freestyle video The Ultimate Weekend. I shot this still off the video while paused on the TV.

For many years, I channeled much of my creativity into the fledgling sport of BMX freestyle. In 1985, I did my first BMX zine. That led to a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, where my boss was a young Andy Jenkins. I got laid off because I didn't really fit in, and Andy hired some kid named Spike Jonze to replace me. I went on to do more zines, freelance for several BMX magazines, produce several bike, skate and snowboard videos, work on over 300 TV episodes, and work on five tours of Cirque du Soleil. It all started because I made a really horrible little zine. Funny how things work out.

My art #4

Sometimes ideas just pop into my head... I lived for a year panhandling to survive, so that's where the idea for the sign came from. I found a beat up crossbow bolt (arrow) while taking a walk one day. A little store in town was selling used stuffed animals for a dollar each. Somehow it all comes together.

My art #3

Graffiti'd question for the ages on the side of Urban Artware Gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I snapped the photo, but just for the record, I don't know what art is. 6th and Trade street