Abstract Art Found in a Parking Lot

I live in a contained condo development in New Jersey, and there's a number of interior streets and parking spacing both for condo owners and for guests. Take a look at the picture below: as you can see, there's some wear and tear on the parking lot surface, there's been some repairs made with tar, and there's also yellow painted lines and arrows to help guide drivers navigate the area. No big deal, right? But one day as I was walking around, it suddenly struck me that this parking lot and these local small streets were like a spectactular art gallery for abstract expressionist art ... scroll down to see what I'm talking about.

Let's start out with a gradual approach - at first I'll just show you a photograph that I took of the parking lot, showing one of the painted arrows similar to what you saw in the photograph above. Personally, there's something about the fluid dark line of tar that bends and curves over the painted edges of the arrow that I found somewhat artistic. But then to take it to the next level, does it seem to you less like a parking lot detail photo and more like art when it's cropped to a tighter detail and framed? My picture below right shows another parking lot arrow with fading paint and more black tar lines, making it somewhat abstract expressionist in style.

Now I'll place a number of framed parking lot surface photos in an art gallery with a person viewing them. Do they feel more like abstract expressionist art works now? The scale of the art works in this gallery space are depicted much bigger than the actual amount of parking lot that was being photographed in the original photos, but the scaling up is what makes them feel like large scale abstract expressionist paintings.

There's a few ways to view my visual experiment here: one, I have a habit of seeing "art" in odd or unexpected places; two, sometimes it's nice to find a visual appreciation for something that might otherwise be considered mundane - finding beauty in the world around us; and three, as an artist, inspiration for making art can be found in numerous ways and places. One could say I'm doing all of the above, and making art from things that are around me. In some ways, isn't that what all artists do? Maybe there's nothing odd or unexpected about this afterall?

parking lot surface photos as abstract art in an art gallery

Here's another pair of framed parking lot surface photos ... would you hang these as art on the walls in your home?

Seeing a parking lot surface as abstract art

Framing a picture of a parking lot surface make it into art

On a side note, this isn't the first time I've "found" abstract art in my condo development parking lot. Check out this blog post where I saw some parked cars with damaged hoods that also took on the visual qualities of beautiful abstract art works. And as far as parking lots go, it's not just my own condo parking lot that brings visual associations: here's another one where I saw some smashed-up candy in the West Orange Library parking lot that looked a lot like a Philip Guston abstract painting from the 1950s.

Share this page via: