In May of 2012, I was involved in a mural-project in New York City. This work, a joint collaboration between the New School as well as the people of El Jardín del Paraiso community garden in the East Village, gave me not only an excellent sniff of the life of
an artist in New York, but also an opportunity to work towards both my own pleasure and the eye and respect of the local community. Here are a few words about the concept behind the mural project:



“To make the originals, I copied one of my paintings and mirrored it in the same time.
My guiding questions were: how do the copy and the original work together? How do they communicate with each other? How will the copy change the original and how will they be simultaneously identical and different? Would they work as the two parts of our brain? The originals were made through different methods, and I did the same while planning the mural, with the goal of creating an interactive painting session. I painted the left part of the picture, using traditional brush technique; then I encouraged the students and the volunteers from the garden community to paint the right part of it using spray-paints. This experimental way of creating a public art-piece like this mural transformed the original idea from a static, visual piece—the mural itself—into a new form of connecting people, an actual act of community-building, lifting us up to a new stage of being together.”

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Here is a short video about the making of the mural: http://youtube/73zNkwwPIj4