Alvarado - SOLD

48" x 36", mixed media on birch panel

Here's a piece I finished a few months ago but forgot to post. It's a picture of 7th and Alvarado in L.A., in the Westlake area with Skid Row in the distance, reminding us how unromantic the city can be.

The street is narrower and the buildings and figures are sketchier, more gestural than they would be in reality, but more to my aesthetic liking and part, more importantly, of my grand scheme to persuade everyone that density can be good and the North American appetite for space and sprawl is really a form of misanthropy.

Incidentally, Alvarado St. is named after the 19th-century governor of California (when California was still Mexico), Juan Bautista Alvarado. Alvarado led a coup to take Monterey, which was then the capital of both Alta and Baja California, and for a time he declared California an independent country. But Mexico quickly took the territory back, and then of course the gringos took it from Mexico. The rest is history.

You can find this and other paintings like 'er on my website, www.ivanostocco.com.

¡Que tengas un buen día!

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