The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume LXXX

It truly is. All over the place we are inundated with advertising and information. You must see it, unless you are blind, and if that is the case, hopefully somebody is describing what is there or handing you a note embossed in braille.

We see so many images up on walls every day, billboards, benches, murals, that we just take them for granted. They are part of the fabric of our lives. Each one tells a short story. They give us directions, influence us to take action (buy that cheeseburger, call your dentist, vote), or they may even send a message that we despise. But signage is nothing new. It has been around a long, long time. The oldest cave paintings in the world go back over 35,000 years. Even then, they were advertising something.

Recently, an amateur sleuth, intrigued with what he was seeing on some of these things, noticed a series of dots and dashes and discerned that they may have something to do with the birth and migration of ungulate species. The Cambridge Archaeological Journal is giving serious credence to this theory and may soon consider this code to be evidence of the earliest written language. If this is the case, the discovery will certainly open the door to looking at such historical murals with fresh eyes, and possibly uncovering something we don’t know yet about human history.

That would be awesome.

Once in a while, in Italy or Greece usually, some fresco is unearthed and we get a nice glimpse of art of the past. If there is something to read, it adds a dash of daily life, and maybe a chuckle, but not much to decipher because we know those languages. For the archaeologists it is a real blast. For humanity, it is spectacular. Art is as close to a window to the past as we can get.

You could spend all day looking online at what has been discovered all over the world, and while I recommend that, I also encourage you to look upon the walls of your city. Murals are everywhere and they are fantastic. For anyone visiting an urban center, murals provide a creative bond to the rest of society. The artists have broken out of the gallery and their works are on full display, for free.

I live in Clearwater and drive 20 miles into St. Petersburg almost every day. St. Petersburg boasts over 600 murals across the city. Many of them are right downtown, near my office. One that I drive by most often is this brown-eyed lady on the wall of a closed convenience store sitting at the corner of First Avenue and Fifth Street North. When I am stopped at the red light I stare at her and she stares back, never blinking. I studied her tattoos and her angel wings, and for the longest time, I told myself, I am going to take a picture of her. For years I told myself that and I never did.

Then one day a couple weeks ago, I had my camera ready and decided the lighting would be great that day, so I pulled over to take these photos. I am so glad I did. Because that building had murals on all four walls around it before that, but suddenly, they were all painted over in light tan. I don’t even remember what those images were. Somebody must be planning to do something with the building. But they did not paint over her. Whoever is making the final decision on what happens to the outside walls of this building must be contemplating what happens to her. Will she stay? Or will she be washed away? What will replace the murals that were lost?

Photography is the only way to capture them. I took a few more photos of my favorites to share here with you.

These are just a few of the murals in downtown St. Petersburg. There are others all over the city. I don't know if anyone has compiled every single one into a digital catalog, but here are a couple of links to see more of the work that adorns our streets.

St. Pete Mural Tour - Murals Graffiti and Street Art in St. Pete Florida (stpetemuraltour.com)

Magnificent Murals | Visit St Petersburg Clearwater Florida (visitstpeteclearwater.com)

I think all this is worth seeing because it can disappear instantly. A building is not a canvas that may be protected for centuries. Brick and mortar building have a fleeting life span. Chances are good that a hundred years from now, most of these images will only exist in pictures. Buildings will eventually be torn down and replaced. There is no way to save the murals without taking extraordinary measures to do so.

I suppose that most mural artists know this going in, and accept the fluid nature of their medium. They know it won't last forever, and mainly create art for the joy it brings them, and secondly for whatever joy it may bring others.

I wonder how those distant ancestors who painted big animals on cave walls must have thought about what they were doing. If they knew the seasons, lunar cycles, and such, did they have any concept of time? Could they think ahead, beyond their inevitable demise?

We can. What will become of our art 35,000 years from now? It is a fair question because that time will come. What will be preserved, generation upon generation?

I hope more of it will survive than we have let been destroyed. War has wiped out whole cities and their art along with them. ISIS blasted and chiseled away at statues thousands of years old, and destroyed multiple World Heritage Sites. French soldiers shot off the nose of the Egyptian sphinx. Vandals have defaced ancient art across the globe for nothing more than a thrill. Donald Trump ordered the destruction of art deco friezes when he demolished a building to make way for Trump Tower, even after he promised them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Protesters have been tearing down confederate statues across the country for years, because they represent racism and slavery. But are they not still art?

Artists take great pride in what they create. Even Hitler painted. His paintings are largely in the hands of private collectors and the US government, not for public display, but even they have been preserved.

I think art should be allowed to have a life of its own, even if it was created by somebody whose ideals do not align with my own. If there is a story behind it, if it was created for a purpose, and the art itself conveys a message of promotional hate or destruction, to send an ill message, I can see how that would irk some people. But then it becomes a historical document we can learn from, and teach people to be better, and still be appreciated as art.

When it is just a guy on a horse, and it can be just about any guy on a horse, I think of the work the artist put into it, the attention to detail, the care taken in every line to produce something they are proud of. I look at it and think, "You know what, it's just a guy on a horse, and a pretty good one, too. Why destroy it? The art didn't do anything wrong."

Vandals aside, those who want to destroy art will say they must do so because of what it represents. Is that destruction of art not an affront to creativity itself? Is being destructive a trait we wish to condone? Is it not just another form of intolerance?

Artists just want to create. And some want to send a definite message with those creations. When George Floyd was killed by a policeman, his life was remembered in murals across the country. He was a man who allegedly tried to spend a counterfeit bill at a convenience store. A crime, but not a violent one, and certainly not something to warrant killing him in the street. But that is what happened, and he has been memorialized.

This one begs that he is remembered forever.

Maybe some messages like this one will outlive us, and inform the future of who we were, and some of those statues will also last, so that our historical record will remain intact to emphasize exactly what happened in our country to completely explain why black lives matter.

The artist who painted the lady on the convenience store is Claudia La Bianca. She is from Sicily and is headquartered in Miami. She specializes in murals and sculptures of the celebration of the female form. She does lovely work. Please click the link to visit her site to see more.

While her angel winged beauty sits stoically at First and Fifth, stealing our gaze to her own, notice that the artist is sending the message You Are Loved. What a great sentiment. Who did she write that to? Anybody who needs it, I suppose, so maybe that is what will save her mural.

What will happen to all of these murals in a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years? Will some of them be cherished and preserved, or only a memory in photographs, which may also be lost to time and the elements? Enjoy them while you can in the here and now, because if they do outlive us and send our messages to future inhabitants of Earth, this is your chance to commune with those people.

Art is the only way to be remembered forever.

Thanks for reading.

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation.