Showing posts with label Joe Pagac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Pagac. Show all posts

Friday, March 15, 2024

Salvador Duran and El Tour de Tucson

At the end of October, 2023, Joe Pagac was replacing a well-known mural which had been in that spot for about six years. Below is a story of the new mural, photos of the old mural, and something surprising Joe did after he finished the new mural.

The original mural

First, the mural painted in 2017 by Diego Roa. It shows Tucson artist Salvador Duran:
Thanks to BG Boyd Photography and his mural database TucsonAZMurals.com for that photo (taken from https://tucsonazmurals.com/murals/salvador_duran.) It looks like someone may have painted something between Salvador's hands since the mural was created… an older closeup below doesn't have the blob.

You can see the mural in 2017, a photo of Salvador and a bit of his story, and more info, in the original post on this blog: Parking lot morphs into cracked earth.

The new mural is coming…

On October 31, 2023, Joe posted a photo to Facebook with his car in front of part of the new mural:



(If you can't see that, here's a link to the Facebook post.)

The new mural

I took these photos near sunrise on December 16, 2023:


Murals are usually replaced after some period of time. This one had been here six years. Still, I was a bit sad that the portrait of Salvador Duran was gone. So I was surprised and happy when I read on the Facebook group Tucson Murals and Street Art that Joe had painted the same portrait on the Toole Avenue side of Hotel Congress:
In case you'd like to see the original and Joe's re-creation side by side, here they are. As always, you can click on the (single) image below to see it and others much larger:
(The exposure on Joe's version — to the right — might not be correct. The bottom looks pretty dark to me.)

Friday, February 23, 2024

Lohse Family YMCA

 Each mural "...highlights different aspects of YMCA offerings."

                                   Swimming and Basketball

By Joe Pagac

                                                Gardening

By Joe Pagac

                                           Horseback Riding

By Joe Pagac

 Click on any photo for larger images.

Monday, January 01, 2024

Murals being made, part 75: Volcano in detail

Happy New Year! Here's news for you about this blog. David Aber and I have been posting here twice a week — Tuesdays and Fridays. But we have so many murals on our to-do list that we'll start posting three times a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — until we work down the backlog (??).

On December 12, 2023, in Volcano, David Aber posted a photo of Joe Pagac's volcano mural on the northeast corner of 6th Street and 6th Avenue. I had taken photos on May 12, 2023, while Joe was painting… but I forgot to update our to-do list of murals, so David didn't know about my photos. After I saw David's post, I decided to stop by again and take a few close-up photos. So this is another post about the same mural.

May 12, 2013

Here's Joe painting. He told me that scaffolding is so expensive to rent that he decided to buy his own. His car — I believe that's a shark — is parked next to the scaffolding. In the vertical photo below, check out the poster he hangs at the top of the scaffolding.

December 16, 2023

A few days after David posted his photo of the mural, I was downtown in the middle of a day of mural-hunting. (I was trying to shorten our long list of murals to photograph.) As I drove by the corner of 6th and 6th, I decided to take photos here with my point-and-shoot camera that has a 40x optical zoom lens; it let me get detailed shots from the fence along 6th Avenue, quite a distance from the mural. I could even zoom in on Joe's signature at the bottom right corner.

Friday, December 22, 2023

The Monica by The Joe (Pagac)

It's been more than a year since Joe Pagac painted a mural for El Tour de Tucson 2022 on the patio wall at The Monica downtown. (So many murals to post here, so little time!) On October 31, 2022, Joe posted a photo on Instagram by Randy Metcalf.

I stopped by on April 29, 2013 to snap photos. Unfortunately, the light wasn't good… there were shadows and reflections:


The caption at the bottom, Aventure dans le désert à vélo! is in French. It means Desert adventure by bike! You can read more about why on The Monica's web page Who was Monica?. It's an interesting story!

The (very) short version is that Monica Flin was a Tucson restaurateur (a person who runs a restaurant professionally) from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. “Monica was the daughter of Jules and Carlota Brunet Flin, both early settlers of Tucson who hailed from France. She grew up speaking French, English, and later Spanish.” The family home was on Court Avenue; it's now the site of El Charro Café downtown — which Monica opened there in 1922.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Volcano

There's a mural at the back of a parking lot on the NE corner of N. 6th Ave. and E. 6th st.

Painted by Joe Pagac








 

Click on the photo for a larger and sharper version.

Update (January 1, 2023): There are more photos in today's post Murals being made, part 75: Volcano in detail.

Friday, December 30, 2022

Historic Motels

By Joe Pagac
There was a dark shadow on the lower right corner.  I lightened it as best I could.

Click on the photo for a larger image.

This aerial photo from BG Boyd Photography was taken November 12th:

Three days later — November 15 — Joe posted a photo on Facebook of himself and the mural in the background:



We posted another car mural of Joe's, at the same address, on December 27: Autos In Black And White.

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Autos In Black And White

By Joe Pagac, Stephanie Pagac Garcia and Lenka Vasiekova.



GM no longer manufactures Pontiacs. Thus, Quebedeaux Pontiac is now Quebedeaux Buick and has moved to E. Speedway Blvd. from N. Oracle Rd.

The mural is located at 1430 N. Oracle Rd.

Click photo for a larger image.

On October 28, Joe posted a photo to Facebook showing himself in front of the mural:



Next time, December 30, we'll wrap up 2022 with another Joe Pagac car mural at the same address.

Tuesday, December 06, 2022

Joe Pagac mural we haven't published in five years

For some reason, this mural on Roadhouse Cinemas hasn't been on the blog since Joe painted it in 2017. I mentioned a newspaper story about it, A movie crew chases outlaws chasing a train, but then forgot to go see it until September 20, 2022:
It's high on the wall, so I used the digital zoom on my phone camera. It doesn't have the quality of a real (optical) zoom, but the photos look okay shrunken for the Web:

Thanks to BG Boyd Photography for this aerial photo taken February 23, 2022:
(It's a wide panorama, so the straight line of the building front looks curved.)

Friday, November 25, 2022

Murals being made, part 72: Scrub this street!

One side of the Union on 6th student apartments runs along Herbert Street, an alley between 4th and 5th Avenues. (The official address for Union on 6th is 316 East 6th Street.) I took the photo above at sunrise on August 23, 2022. The patterns from dancer's dress stretch into the distance.

Unfortunately, trash containers obscure parts of the beautiful mural. I watched for months, hoping they'd be taken away. But I finally gave up after noticing that at least one was labeled with the name of a 4th Avenue business, Drunken Chicken. (I guess that there's really no other place to put a trash bin… it couldn't be on 4th Avenue itself.)

In the summer of 2021, Joe Pagac was painting this mural-in-pieces along with Nolan Patterson (@basik__art, with two “_” characters) and Dixie Vonne (who has a private account, @dixievonne). Here are three photos from Joe's Instagram account @joepagac:

(If you'd like to see the original posts with comments, here are links… …)

I snapped photos on August 10, 2021, showing the stripes and bubbles finished (?) and the dancer almost done:

David Aber took this photo on September 19, 2021:
Lighting was difficult around sunrise on August 23, 2022. But, later in the day, there might also have been trucks parked here and other stuff that obscured the mural even more. So here are photos from right (stripes starting, from near the dancer's dress) to left (bubbles):

It's so sad that such a creative and cheerful mural is hidden along an alley lined with trash bins. When Joe, Nolan and Dixie painted it, I wonder if they knew…?

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Making sick kids happy

Joe Pagac must have a lot of energy! Not long ago, he finished 5+ months hiking from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Coast Trail… here's a map. He paints murals as energetically. Sometime before his trip, he painted the hallway at Tucson Medical Center connected to the Pediatric Emergency Department. Here's the spot, not far from an outside door, where kids check in:
If you're already inside the hospital, you'll see this entrance to the hall:
If you aren't familiar with TMC, there are maps at information desks, interactive kiosks, and online at https://www.tmcaz.com/maps-and-directions/ (the halls are shown in the Main Hospital Map). Once you get there, you'll find that the murals are interactive if you use the Artivive app. You can search for the app by name in your phone's app store, but there's also a QR code on the wall next to each mural (TMC has free Wi-Fi):
I'll take you along the hall from the outside door to the main hallway in the middle of the hospital:

I was there on October 2, 2022.