CicLAvia on Broadway

"CicLAvia on Broadway," 30" x 24", acrylic, collage, spray, graphite, and oil on birch panel

Here's a whimsical piece I completed recently and showed last weekend at a fair in Beverly Hills.

It depicts the last CicLAvia held in L.A., that cut right through the downtown and brimmed with every stripe of folk, weirdo and normalite alike. I partook in it with my kiddos and spouse and we were almost giddy to be out in the open streets in the core of it all, no cars, no hyper-vigilance, laughing at the excuses some had for bikes and the hot-rodded custom jobs.

If you don't know CicLAvia, it comes out of Bogotá, Colombia, where despite the civil war people have taken to the streets in non-hydrocarbon forms of transport every week for some 40 years. In L.A. where the cars can seem to outnumber and swarm out the people, the quarterly CicLAvia has forced a re-guidance of local transportation policy and improved air quality by a fifth.

Paint-wise, I was after something representational but that dissolved at the edges into a dreamy state, something almost fauvist, Kandinsky before his Bauhaus period and the evaporation of living forms—the way I actually experienced the event, as normal and abnormal at once.

Kandinsky, "The Ludwigskirche in Munich," 1908

All this and still "Stocco," of course, which gets harder to escape all the time.

For this painting and others, check out, as always, fellow travelers, www.ivanostocco.com.