Four Generations of Arabbers

Gaia, a street artist featured in Volume XII of LUMINA, has launched a kickstarter account to raise funds for the transformation and eventual historical preservation of the yard used by the Arabbers, a group of Baltimore fruit vendors famous for their horse-drawn carriages.

The following information comes directly from the kickstarter page:

“Arabbing as a practice began in the 19th century in Baltimore when easy access to stables and the shipyards of the inner harbor made selling fruit with horse drawn carriages an attainable entrepreneurial enterprise for African Americans in Baltimore. During the war effort and after WWII arabbing became an almost entirely African American trade. Competition from supermarkets and restrictions from modern zoning laws have endangered this heritage. Today there are only a couple sites left that serve as arabbing stables, with the Fremont Avenue location being one of the most prominent in the city. Today, arabbing serves as a viable living for a handful of men and their families whilst also serving a variety of communities including neighborhoods that do not have easy access to produce and whole foods.

Mata Ruda, Gaia, Nanook and LNY will use the story and experience of Baltimore’s fruit sellers to produce murals that will span the entirety of inside and exterior of the Fremont stables. The paintings are apart of a larger plan that will be implemented on behalf of the Arabber Preservation Society in the near future to make the site into a visitor center and provide the necessary renovations to the preexisting stable.”

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/414330743/arabber-mural-project

Interview by Craig Ledoux

Andreas Englund is an art director and artist currently based in Stockholm, Sweden.  His main body of work focuses on an unnamed superhero whose life, while fantastic, is filled, too, with dropped groceries, sticky jam jars, and bad clementines.   His piece, “Shopping,” is featured on this year’s cover of LUMINA.  Andreas believes that humor is the greatest vessel for communication.  His work has been featured in Juxtapoz, and can be found at http://www.artofdala.com/

First of all, I wanted to thank you for lending your work to the journal, and the cover in particular.  I can’t think of a better image to represent the writing and art within.  This year’s issue, Volume XII, features work that is bold, intelligent, and sometimes devastating, though it never seems to lose that sense of humor which is so prevalent in your paintings. 

You’ve said in other interviews that “capturing the lives of ‘perfect people’ is boring and predictable.”[i]  Ever, a graffiti artist and fellow contributor to LUMINA, says that he likes “to ‘deify’ an unremarkable person.”[ii]  What is it about the ordinary that draws you in?  Or, to put it another way, what made you decide to highlight the everyday aspects of this hero’s life?

This person is extreme. He’s someone who you might even have dreamed about being when you were a kid. Someone who has it all. By putting him in everyday situations I try to show that despite being powerful by wealth, strength or intelligence, we still share the same kind of ordinary problems. It’s my way of showing that people around the world, who might seem very different, on the contrary are very much the same.

Have you begun to formulate your hero’s story over the years, or do you prefer to let the images speak for themselves?  Does he have a name, an origin story?

I guess this is my way of telling this character’s story, not by writing it down, but by creating paintings. It’s what I like best, telling stories with pictures. If I were a writer then I would probably write down the story in a book or two, but I’m no writer so you have to bear with me on this one

Another aspect is that I think it’s easier to connect with a character when you as a viewer can fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Like when you read a book, your imagination creates the pictures. Here it’s kind of the opposite.

What are your comic book influences, your fine art influences?

I love Banksy and the way he communicates through his art. I see myself working on the same kind of foundation as he is. When it comes to comic book artists I like Simon Bisley. His technique is just breathtaking. Regarding fine art, I like Edward Hopper and I think you can see that in my work. Also, classic Masters like Rembrandt when it comes to portraits. I also like two Swedish old masters: Anders Zorn for his amazing technique, and Carl Larson whose house (which is an open museum today) has also given me a lot of inspiration for its creativeness.

Banksy

You paint on fairly large canvasses.  Can you talk about your process? 

 I want to create scenes, like a director. In my case I do it with the help of taking photos and then, like a puzzle, adding all pieces together digitally, creating the final scene. Since the final piece will be a painting this sketch/image doesn’t have to look flawless. Just enough to work as a template. Nevertheless I love to create these naturalistic looking scenes that don’t exist in real life. This is the creative part and, for me, the most important one. The next phase is to paint this motif with oil on a canvas. Like Banksy with his street art, he first creates the idea then transfers it on a wall. In his case the wall itself gives the motive an extra dimension because of its location or how it looks.  For me, I want the big canvas and the old school technique to give my motifs this kind of extra dimension as well.

You began this series in 2004 with “Strawberry Jam.”  Do you see this as an ongoing series, or does it have an end date?  If so, what’s next for you?

I have a lot of other ideas that I want to start painting so there will certainly be more than just the superhero motifs coming up. My own guess is that I will paint this character as long as I have something interesting to tell through him.