The Ballad of Lizzy’s Art Crawling and Axel’s Sixth Year of Existence

Isn’t this awesome?

So apart from the literal face-melting weather this weekend my family had a few great events. Apart from my son Axel’s monumental age change from 5 to 6 (and the LEGO building, Castle painting, and Mimi’s eating therein) we visited some art. We live in Anaheim and there’s always some little festival, swap meet, or some Downtown experience to visit. I’m pretty sure the Downtown guys are trying to CPR the mostly vacant downtown little district’s mostly empty shops and eateries. Although I sometimes loath the thought at dragging myself outside to walk\stand in the sun for a few hours at some trinket table, this one was actually fun. It was the Anaheim Art Crawl. Contrary to popular belief I do enjoy art I just have very specific tastes. There were lots of chalk drawings along the street and messages written for the reader. There was a Swing Band and pro dancers. There was that awesome Healthy Junk eatery that Liz and I enjoy so much. But there was one booth I was particularly interested in.

There was an artist named Jake Perez who had a setup where he was painting while we watched. Looking at his work I was blown away or face-melted without temperature. He had all these painting of Zombies with bloody mouths or glowing eyes or just a bunch of really bad ass horror paintings. I quickly grabbed a card and watched as the Artist painted colors onto some grisly zombie face. My daughter caught up with me and asked “Is this the Walking Dead?” I quickly reminded her of Romero’s work. Lizzy is very artistic and draws a lot of pictures in her little notepads and such. I’ll come to my desk sometimes and find a few pages of illustrations. Sometimes It’s a little comic starring our family as ninjas. Other times it’s Pyramid Head from Silent Hill. Then every now and then she draws Alien vs Predator (of course she calls the Predator daddy.) We walked the rest of the show and came back to sit in front of the booth (in our opinion was the best view of the place) and ogled the awesomeness a bit more.

Lizzy and Axel found some chalk and set to creating their own masterpieces on the asphalt. Axel turned out a Vampire, a mummy, and a werewolf (which he called daddy). and Lizzy drew a Zombie. Not just any zombie however, the zombie we were staring at about 15 feet across the street. And she did pretty good. It actually looked like the painting. We told her she should show it to the artist and let him know how much she liked his work. She ran across the street and conversed for a few moments and came back with a signed print!! A few moments later the artist himself, a Mr. Jake Perez came and snapped a shot of her homage. We thanked him he thanked us and we went home and framed his print. The next day I was blown away to see he had put Lizzy’s chalk drawing on his blog.

Thanks Jake. You inspired my little girl and I can’t thank you enough for that.

Pretty “Dead” on.

See? Proof I didn’t make this story up.

You want to be inspired? Check out Jake’s site.

http://www.artistjakeperez.com/