WOOL | Covilhã Urban Art Festival _ curating FUSING _ 1st edition | MÁRIO BELÉM
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Details
Title: Untitled
Creator: MÁRIO BELÉM
Creator Lifespan: 1977
Creator Nationality: Portuguese
Creator Gender: Male
Creator Birth Place: Portugal
Date: 2013-08-01
Location Created: Avenida Dr. Manuel Gaspar de Lemos (Parque das Abadias) / Muro do Centro de Artes e Espetáculos (CAE) da Figueira da Foz, District - Coimbra; Country - Portugal
location:lon: -8.862179
location:lat: 40.154629
Technique: aerosol + plastic paint + marker
Physical Dimensions: w22,00 x h4,00 x d0 m (complete)
Details: The year 2013 was one of the busiest and most productive years of WOOL with the expansion to new geographies, seeking to answer the growing and challenging requests made by companies, cultural associations, municipal or private entities.
The month of August marked the date WOOL debuted at Figueira da Foz, curating and producing all Urban Art actions when it integrated the Fusing Culture Experience festival. This was a unique event in Portugal that brought together in a single space extensive to the entire city Music, Art, Sports and Food. It also marks the debut of Street Art activities in this city, which, in general and from past experience, means long months of preparation, conversations and negotiations with all government and private entities, in order to demystify many of the preconceptions around these artistic expressions, reaffirming and reinforcing the idea that this Art, when everything is well designed and built, is a huge capital gain for the city, at numerous levels, which I will later present.
From all the activities at Figueira da Foz city centre we point out 5 (five) author murals, a stencil workshop, a reflexion of our constant concern in the promotion, understanding and production of this Art. Among all the murals, I must highlight the ones made by the artists ADD FUEL and MÁRIO BELÉM because of their themes always approached in their work: “portugality” and “local tradition”, fundamental in the search for empathy and identification with the local community and thus its safeguard .
Specifically, the piece by Mário Belém was inspired by local myths and legends. Presented as a plot of the Portuguese maritime imagery. This work has as a central subject a orange fish, and every frame unfolds from it.
Biography: I've drawn since I can remember myself. I used to draw lots of Snoopys and Mickeys. (,,,) I went to university to study architecture (thinking that it would be the wise thing to do) and I hated it. Thats when I learned that i wasn't very good at drawing cogs and screws, and that I always left smudges on the paper I was drawing on (I still do).I studied graphic design at Ar.Co, in Lisbon, and I liked it. I enjoyed what design brings into your life, I enjoyed (some) teachers, I enjoyed the other students (who were all characters), mostly I enjoyed that the school hours were light and I was able to work on the side. (...) Two or three years ago I decided I was tired of only working on the computer screen, the result was always too clean and straight. So I filled myself with courage and started to (re) learn to draw by hand (and it was much more difficult than I ever imagined). One day I walked by a very large building in Lisbon, painted with a beautiful mural, I stopped and thought "this is what I want to do." Every time I can, I surround myself with spray cans, paint rollers and dirty clothes. I still have to learn lotttttssss of things (making a straight line with a spray can isn't the same thing as drawing a straight line with a pencil). One of these days I'll paint a very large building, you'll see ... I've been learning that my work provokes extreme reactions in people, some like my work, others don't. As long as I'm given a chance to produce colorful stuff I'm happy. Thats it.