As one who loves stencils, and who would love to print with stencils if I could figure out how to do it, I think this concept is brilliant, and wish Mr. Curtis all success.

Whether his projects will work as an environmentalist statement is hard to say.  As with much art, the methods do not look especially green.  I quit silk-screen print-making partly for that reason, even though the inks they use nowadays are much less toxic than before.

In this case, a fair amount of energy goes into making the aluminum (?) sheets, and then into cutting the stencils from them.  Then, a great deal of water is expended to cleanse the dirty surface exposed by the stencil when it is held in place.  Was there already a budgeted city project to cleanse the walls of that tunnel?  In that case, by cleansing them selectively, the artist is perhaps conserving water, since the entire surface does not have to be cleansed.

The botanical designs are pleasant, as one might expect: decorative, peaceful, illustrative of native plantlife.  But surely he will come up with something a bit more spectacular in time ...

By the way, an ancient analogue for this art form is Greek red-figure vase-painting.  The black glaze was first applied evenly all over the vase; then the painter -- who was more like a sculptor in a way -- would scrape away the black, and so create a detailed figure in a contrasting lighter color.  When the vase was fired, the black background came out looking smooth and glossy; by contrast, the exposed area, with the figures, came out a more or less bright red-orange, but not too glossy.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

It would be great to see forests on trains rolling by.

I had an idea for a chalk jet printer bar that would hang over freeway overpasses and put radical slogans for all the traffic to see.  The "crime" of grafitti  lessened because the chalk would wash off easily.

But these natural scenes are much better,more radical green without words.

The beauty of the printer design is it could be done to the artist's specific scene for that particular venue with a quick drive by art.  And zoom the non-descritpt vehicle dissappears into the early morning darkness, before commuters hit the freeway.

This is what we're talking about, harmless, non-vioent, civil disobedience.  The chalk means the canvass will renew itself for another picture in a week or so.  

And as you say Canis, that painting can be toxic, no toxins with chalk.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

OK, Amazing, that sounds good.  I do not know what produces the colors in colored chalk, but presumably the colors could be produced in a non-toxic, non-polluting way.

Stencils can easily be made in bio-degradable materials.  And I have no idea what the artist in the video has in mind, which justifies his using a metal.

Botanical subject matter is always good and satisfying.  Still, the artist wants to create something spectacular.  I would love to work on spectacularly huge reproductions of Audubon's prints of birds, amidst native flora.

Also, ephemerality is a gorgeous concept, which does not appeal to all artists.  Many of us have a classical Roman concept of needing to build things in marble.  But those Tibetan monks, and Navajo sages, who painstakingly draw complicated images with colored sands, for the sake of a single ceremony, and then afterwards insist that the images be swept away, are artistic heroes of mine.

So, fly-by-night images of chalk are just what we need, say I.

Here in NYC, we have an artist, who I think is from eastern Europe, who draws big reproductions of details from Italian Renaissance paintings on sidewalks, in colored chalk, with a preference for Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.  He applies a fixative (an environmental issue?), and the completed image lasts a couple of months.  I first came upon him several years ago down in Greenwich Village, on 7th Avenue, where he was doing the Delphic Sibyl outside a Duane Reade.  But lately, he has been working in our neighborhood.  This past winter, he did Jesus Christ the Judge, with the Virgin Mary at his side, from Michelangelo's "Last Judgement," maybe five meters from the door of the liquor store that we frequent; I was always careful to step aside.  That one has now worn away.  But more recently, a few blocks down, he has done a portrait of Hillary Clinton, and next to it one of Barack Obama, which he has not yet finished.

By the way, DR, I forgot to point out before that the correct spelling of the Italian loan-word, the masculine plural passive participle from a variant of the verb meaning "to scratch," is "graffiti."  There is only a single "t" in Italian (and Latin) past participles formed this way.  Cf. the musical terms "cantata" (a piece which is sung), "legato" (notes which are bound together), "sostenuto" ("sustained," of a note which is held).

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.