Last weekend I took my sister to the annual Denver Chalk Art Festival in Larimer Square. We went on Saturday; as we discovered, most of the pictures are not finished until Sunday, so that’s when we should have gone. Here’s a sampling of what we saw. Unfortunately, I don’t have the artists’ names for any of them. The portrait of the woman in white was especially interesting: The picture itself was oddly elongated, but a piece of paper taped to the ground in front of it directed you to stand there and look through your camera lens. And voilà, the picture appeared in proper perspective. It’s funny to think of the thousands of photographs of this picture that now exist in Colorado. Other chalk artists set themselves the task of reproducing a painting; the photo of the American Indian with the buffalo robe shows a detail of one of these.
VAPOR AND FLOW 
The elongated photo of the woman reminds me of a recent experience. I saw Paul Simon at a venue in St. Paul a few days ago. Because I was slow in getting tickets, we had pretty bad seats: up a level and directly to the side of the stage. Views of Simon and the band were projected onto a large screen set up at the back of the stage.
When Simon’s image was projected onto the screen, it looked normal to me. But I noticed that, if other people’s images were projected onto the screen, they appeared far too narrow: I didn’t have a reference point for determining what they would look like in reality (as I do for Simon), so my brain wasn’t processing the image that I saw and giving me one that looked normal. It looked as though Simon was performing with a bunch of noodle people: tall and very, very narrow.
Great photos, of course.
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