One Fort Worth artist, Jan Riggins, is a woman who can create beautiful images no matter the medium or style. Whether it’s watercolors or chalk; in two dimensions or three; on the ground, on canvas, on a wall, or on the body, Jan creates beautiful and wondrous things.

photo credit: Jan Riggins

When I met Jan, she was kind enough to give me a tour of her home gallery. The first thing I noticed were the watercolors. The walls were lined with portraits of animals, drawn with a level of realism and detail that I did not know was possible from watercolors. Among the animals were lions, zebras, birds, and more, all strikingly beautiful. Jan explained to me just how intensive the process was to create these works of art. Each one took weeks of meticulous work and an almost pathological attention to detail. Water coloring was Jan’s preferred medium for the longest time, but that began to change a few years ago.

Jan did not set out to become an artist. Growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, Jan was a talented clarinetist, competing throughout high school and college. Her mother and grandmother were visual artists, and those art genes and the love of creating are strong. While working in a “real job,” she realized that she had to do something, anything, to let her creative side free. Her interest in chalk art began during the Covid shutdown in March of 2020, when Jan and her daughter began to use their driveway as their canvas. Intrigued with the possibilities of this new medium, Jan dove headfirst into the world of three-dimensional chalk art.

photo credit: Jan Riggins

Chalk is a very different medium from watercolors, and making the works seem three dimensional just adds more challenges, but Jan adapted wonderfully. Luckily for her, there is a thriving, although comparatively small, chalk art community that was willing to help her out. Chalk art typically is showcased in chalk art festivals, and Jan has been to many of those, travelling to places like Atlanta, Minnesota, and Michigan to “perform.” I say “perform” because there is a definite element of performance to it. Part of the fun of chalk festivals is to watch the artists create their art. Artists are expected to interact with the crowd, answering questions and showing the crowd how the art is made. This can be helpful especially in the case of three-dimensional chalk art, which is a long and difficult process from planning to completion.

Most artists at chalk art festivals content themselves with creating two-dimensional art. They don’t want the headaches associated with three-dimensional chalk art. Three-dimensional chalk art requires a huge amount of preparatory work before the festival even begins with no guarantee the final image will work, making it a risky choice when you only have a weekend to create a piece of work that is, in the end, completely transitory. There is no starting over when it comes to three-dimensional chalk art.

photo credit: Jan Riggins

A three-dimensional art piece is only as good as its preparation. Typically, the artist meticulously plans the piece on a grid. Each square of the grid represents a square foot of pavement, with the grid acting as a map for the artist. Creating the grid is one of the hardest parts of the whole project. The artist must stretch and contort their image in just the right way to achieve the three-dimensional effect, making the image look very strange in two-dimensions. After the grid is completed, the artist follows the map, recreating the image on the ground. It is intensive, backbreaking work, often taking a full weekend to complete an image.

Once the piece is finished, it can be fully enjoyed by the crowd, but to get full effect, it must be viewed in the right manner. Three-dimensional art depends on perspective. There is one perfect place to stand to experience the three-dimensional effect, and it really helps to view the art through the lens of a camera, which will capture the work forever. Chalk is temporary. That, however, is one of the things that make chalk art festivals so fun. You get to be one of the few people who can see the art in person as it was meant to be seen. You get to watch the artists as they create their art before it gets washed away. The journey is more important than the destination.

photo credit: Jan Riggins

Chalk art is not the only temporary art Jan makes. She has recently started experimenting with body art. Using peoples’ hands as a canvas, Jan uses the skin’s texture and the shadows created by the bones and sinews to create paintings of nature and animals, which has always been her preferred subject matter. The works are temporary like the chalk, but photography allows them to stick around forever.

Jan Riggins is truly gifted artist. Whether her canvas is the ground, the body, or actual canvas does not matter. She utilizes all of them to full effect, and the results are beautiful no matter what. Those art genes. They’re strong.

Eric Zukoski is a senior at the University of Texas. He is interning with Madeworthy.

The post Finding Beauty in the Temporary first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.

Zinn was in town for a few days to explore the city, demonstrate his unique set of skills, and on a windy evening he shared the story of his artistic journey that acts as the basis for his art book, “Temporary Preserves”. Affable and charmingly natural, David Zinn has more to teach us than best practices to save your knees or protect your hands. His artwork lives in the vortex of improvisation, aesthetics and culture with sprinklings of metaphysical creativity mojo that at no point takes itself seriously. A sublime appreciation of the moment; engineered in true invention, mystery and discovery and a much-appreciated reminder that all too often we are not engaged with our surroundings.

Credit the grey skies back home in Ann Arbor for Zinn discovering the unique characters living beneath the neighboring sidewalks; too much time spent indoors can make it a moral imperative to go outside as soon as the weather permits. A gift set of chalk had sat dormant since they were given until one day they became a part of destiny. As he notes in his book, “Often it’s something I’ve never drawn before; sometimes I’m not even sure what it is when I’m finished drawing it.” And, then, there’s Sluggo, his little green alien character, who now has his own Facebook page. Fortunately, Zinn’s home state includes chalk by name as one of the explicit modes of Free Speech, so his delightful creations pose no legal recourse – but aspiring artists should know that laws regarding chalk vary by municipality.

When asked if he’s an artist, Zinn might respond, “What’s an Artist? I draw stuff on stuff.” He admits that drawing can be a friend when you are lonesome, something familiar when you feel strange, “Drawing is one of my favorite drinking buddies.” Along with his Chalk Box, Zinn carries a backpack with various tools of the trade, like knee pads, gardening gloves, charcoal and a walking stick modified for chalk. Art can be wrought with mystification, exclusion and other currents of taste; fearless creativity, more than art, is what seems to rest at the core of what Zinn discusses when he encourages, “Make marks on the world.”

His love of doodles emerged after his father realized his two contentious sons were less of a problem when they had paper to draw on. The difference between their approaches would define the implicit challenge Zinn’s work presents to him and anyone so inclined; the blank page is much scarier than building on the elements you’ve been given. As he tells it, he found himself drawing imaginary critters because he felt he couldn’t mess them up. The challenge of infinite choices can be overwhelming, so Zinn prefers the well-lived upon concrete of our nation’s sidewalks. Eventually, the ingenuity of those Doodle Battles would flower into the improvisational problem-solving capabilities that fuel his anamorphic musings – the refrain of their old battle cry ringing in his ears, “Betcha can’t make something out of that.”

A slab of concrete can take ordinary procrastination into the stratosphere. “I realized the whole world’s a doodle battle and its always my turn.” Inherently improvisational, rather than constructing elaborate plans that require teams; Zinn says it feels as though he has a secret cheat code. Finding spaces and spots works the imagination aesthetically and allows the artist to create beyond their singular conceptions or abilities, as his rewarding little discoveries pop up off the concrete when viewed from the right spot. Of course, his chosen canvas comes with its drawbacks, “I always work with a constant risk of getting kicked in the head.” Not to mention the battle between mass transit and inspiration as he recalls a recent part of his tour, “Missed a bus the other day ‘because I just had to finish a Hippo.”

Zinn’s work on the streets invites questions about how we experience art more formally, in museums and galleries, and what implications the context has on our expectations. Typically working in windows of two hours or less, he prefers to live in the realm of the unexpected – the more personal process of finding surprises or leaving treasures behind. Once you start looking for them, your perspective on your surroundings will change and, as with the mechanisms of the creative process, your mind will be changed. “Pareidolia” is the psychological phenomenon responsible for the mind’s experiencing the illusion of familiarity – think Drunk Octopus on the back of a door – in the case of David Zinn’s chalk art, it is what allows for the appearance of depth by manipulating the vanishing point. Though he admits, “It can be sad to return and see how quickly the drawings get destroyed.” The work’s concentration is reminiscent of the ornate sand mandalas of the Tibetan Buddhist, which are ritualistically destroyed upon completion to represent the transitory nature of the material world.

An Austin native, Lyle Brooks relocated to Fort Worth in order to immerse himself in the burgeoning music scene and the city’s rich cultural history, which has allowed him to cover everything from Free Jazz to folk singers. He’s collaborated as a ghostwriter on projects focusing on Health Optimization, Roman Lawyers, and an assortment of intriguing subjects requiring his research.

The post Make Marks on the World: David Zinn’s Chalk Box first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.