The Chalk is Strong in this One

(archive - written Saturday 11^th September 2010)

Whatever bleaching you might expect from the California sun, San Luis Obispo is actually a pretty colourful town.  The buildings and shops of the downtown streets are a riotous array of pastels and ochres and everything else seems to follow, from the fresh fruit and sunflowers that crowd the stalls at the Thursday Farmer’s Market to the seventy saliva sodden shades of gum stinking up the streets around Bubblegum alley; from the book jackets filling the windows of The Novel Experience to the lurid tones of its owner Jim’s favourite Hawaiian shirt as he grabs a sneaky smoke on the street outside; from the red velvet or rose petal pistachio vegan frosting on the ‘Amy Bakes’ Cupcakes on the counter of the Granada Bistro to the vibrant bunches of assorted Nipomo roses sent to its bartender Dayna by a hopeful admirer; from the tattoos adorning the forearms of nearly everyone in the Frog and Peach to the shimmering pastels of the traditional Dutch tandems riding the happening and the sparkling tin foil and neon glows of the riders’ costumes, thrown together to follow September’s ROBOTS theme.  Even the Cal Poly sweaters come in a range of colours and you should hear the language in Mexican takeaway Tonitos at three in the morning.  Yes, San Luis Obispo is certainly colourful.  It’s good to be back.

This weekend, San Luis Obispo is more colourful than ever.  Hundreds of SLO citizens have turned out to paint the town red; and blue and green and yellow, not to mention violet and lime and purple and ochre and crimson and brick and magenta and mauve; in fact, any colour of chalk you can get.  Down on Mission Plaza, it is the annual ‘I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival’.  Several streets have been blocked off, allocated into large squares and sold to local business sponsors, who then send in artists to cover them in chalk.  The plaza is a chaos of colour as every chalk artist sits in the middle of their painting in a pose that makes you think that they have been freeze-framed while break-dancing, one leg flung out at an odd angle to balance them as they lean forward to sponge three colours of chalk into complicated shades to catch the shadow in the springs of a colossal mousetrap while a four foot mouse slavers over a giant (perfectly shaded) hunk of gruyere in front of them.  Tigers and bikinied surfer girls jostle for position with the Statue of Liberty, Madonna and the Madonna.  A couple of excited teenaged girls exclaim over a beautifully rendered wolf in a half-finished picture, certain that it’s Jacob the werewolf from Twilight: Eclipse but I can see the artist beginning to add St Francis of Assisi and I know they’ll be disappointed.

 The detail is astonishing.  Some of the artists will spend hours perfecting a single fold of a dress, while their partner patiently holds an umbrella over them to keep of the mid afternoon rays.  Each has a tool box with hundreds of varying shades of chalk, carefully arranged into a rainbow array.  Some of the chalk sticks cost as much as $5 a stick for the really close work, so these collections are carefully prized.  These are the professionals.  But anyone with a bit of talent can get involved too.  Further down the street, we see Cara and Maddie from Blue intent on an abstract painting, sponsored by a friend’s business.  A surfie looking guy writes ‘IN LOVING MEMORY’ beneath a picture of the twin towers, mindful of the date.  Everyone is having a go.  The kids from Nico and Isabela’s school have their own spot round the corner of the Mission and they have put together an image that looks uncannily like Archbishop Vincent Nichols from Westminster skateboarding on a blue double decker bus past some beach balls.  Extraordinary.  Of course the Mission of San Luis Obispo was named after a bishop so it’s more likely to be him but either way, it’s damn good.  Marianne and I are inspired to try our luck.

Our subject matter is simple.  Ever since I arrived I’ve been pushing my book around the local businesses and media of San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles with the hopeless optimism of a Labrador with a soggy tennis ball in the middle of a lawn bowls meet.  There are now more people ignoring my calls and emails and ducking down side streets to avoid me than in the entire course of my romantic history.  My picture features in many local newspaper offices but only in the security guard booths hanging over notes like ‘ON NO ACCOUNT LET THIS GUY IN’.  I wander into wineries with hopeful bundles of merchandising materials; flyers, posters, display cards and wander back out again with the same load clutched in my grasping paws.  I foist flyers for the book into the unwilling arms of Cal Poly students in the queue for the barbecue because I have overheard them telling girls that they like reading.  I beg bartenders to keep them behind their bars and have been besieging the SLO Bike Kitchen, birthplace of a dozen tall bikes, with armfuls of my leaflets.  I have had some success and the book is now stocked in a few open-minded wineries and bookstores and I’ve fixed up a couple of signing events as well.  It’s a slow war of attrition but gradually the locals are becoming more familiar with Cath’s little Airstream at Morro Rock drawing, even if the books themselves aren’t flying off the shelves.  I wish all readers were as excited by the book as little Nico who has his own copy and points excitedly at the pages that feature him.  The chalk art is my latest opportunity to tart the book.  I will not be found wanting.  Marianne and I set out to find our site.

Beyond the professionals, past the talented amateurs, around the corner from the booked out slots is a car park, divided into two foot squares, with a smattering of sun umbrellas shading the groups of children etching various splodges of colour and heart shapes.  This is the only place left for us.  And, we are told, we have to make it look as if the children are doing the picture.  Marianne and I get to work.  I perform the difficult and highly skilled job of holding the picture of the cover while she kneels on the hard tarmac in the baking sun and draws it out and Isabela and Nico swarm grumbling around us.  Once the design is done, it’s time to add colour.  Not for us the endlessly careful frozen break-dance or minute plastic-gloved mixes of three varying shades of the same colour.  $6 bought us a box of twelve chalks and once we’ve swapped the reds and browns for more blue, that’s what we have to create our masterpiece. 

We begin.

Half an hour later, we have used the entire box of chalk and all the sponges, cloths and spare sticks of white we could scrounge from the children around us.  There has been mutiny in the ranks when Nico decided that there wasn’t enough yellow on the Airstream and took matters into his own hands and Isabela frankly refused to be put to work.  Marianne has done everything that requires any level of skill or artistry and I have managed to get more blue onto my hands, bare legs, shorts and camera than on the sky part of the picture.

 

But, as we step back to admire our handiwork, I am thrilled.  It looks amazing.  My book cover almost perfectly rendered (if you’re not overly particular about the scale, curve of the Airstream roof, the darkness of its windows, the colour of Morro Rock or the perfect symmetry of the text).  I feel so proud.  And I can see it’s getting people’s attention, looming three times the size of the children’s artwork surrounding it.  A couple of small boys wander up, eyes widening at the sight.  ‘Wow,’ says the first one, ‘what’s that?’  I turn to him, feeling a surge of hope.  I know that this small boy will be the first of a new generation of readers, a turning point that ensures the future of my book, and of roller skaters and wine makers everywhere.  I will tell him of the delights contained within.  I will convert him.  He will skip home and beg his parents to buy a copy.  He will promise to go to bed on time so that they can read it to him.  It will become his favourite book, then that of his classmates and his friends and the youth of San Luis Obispo County.  There will be a TV cartoon, a merchandise deal, baseball caps with the Airstream logo, action figures of Mexican Chris and Scott Hawley.  It begins here, with this small boy.  I open my mouth and prepare to start this inevitable revolution but the child’s friend is too quick for me.  ‘It’s Darth Vader, man.’ he says to the boy and looks at me with respect.  ‘Ossum.’

I take another look.  He’s right.  The Airstream’s windows look like cavernous black eyes.  You can see the sinister black helmet in the looming dome of Morro Rock.  The whole effect has a malevolence to it.  You can almost hear the heavy breathing.  It really does look like him and I know now that I will never convince this particular child that my book is anything other than Darth Vader.

Marianne is disappointed for me.  ‘That boy was your last hope?’, she asks.  ‘No,’ I reply, thinking of little Nico, ‘there is another’.