March 2015 Events

March has arrived & there is lots to do! March 1st was spent in Tampa, Florida at the Tampa Museum of Art creating an 8×8 ft
Chalk mural with 10 other acclaimed artists.

Royal Tiger

image

Saturday’s rain didn’t stop us from finishing our pieces for the 45th annual Gasparilla Festival of the arts. Such a beautiful city & perfect Tampa weather Sunday!
Day 2

Gasparilla Art Fest 2015

Next Sunday, March 15th, I will be street painting for the city of Hollywood Florida at their annual St. Patricks’s Day parade & family event! Looking forward to releasing my inner Irish on the street between 2pm-6pm Downtown Hollywood.
http://www.stpatricksparade.com

Lake Worth 2015

Lake Worth Street Painting 2015

The 21st Lake Worth Street Painting Festival was a great success this year! Hundreds of artists created live chalk murals on the streets of Downtown Lake Worth, Florida Feb 21st-22nd sharing their passion & expression on the pavement. Here is my worked titled “Joy”, also featured in the Huffington Post article below:

Joy by Carrie Bennett

Lake Worth, Fl

Carrie Bennett

Joy

“Color the City” Bottle Cap Mural!

My young art students have been working hard creating a bottle cap mural collaboration for a special installation this spring! We have collected bins of recycled plastic caps and color coded them accordingly, working together to create our design plan. We are currently attaching our caps onto plywood sheets and plan to showcase our finished work at the local Pompano Beach Whole Foods Market for Earth Month this April! It will be very exciting to see our work in a public venue to show off our beautiful finished masterpiece. More pics to come!

Whole Foods Mural

Coral Springs Street Mural for Biz Art 2015

Saturday’s Biz Art event in Coral Springs was a great success! I met so many kind people and enthusiastic kids of all ages! I created a brightly colored mockingbird for the literary theme of “To Kill a Mockingbird” selected by the Coral Springs Museum of Art.

Biz Art
Mockingbird

image
image

imageimageimage

Chalkfest

City Art Projects!

FALL EVENT CALENDAR!

CHALK FEST 2014

October 10-12th was Marietta, Georgia’s 4th annual Chalk Fest, a beautiful street painting festival featuring many talented chalk artists from around the country.

Marietta

Chalkfest 2014

Chalkfest

BROWARD 100 Kick-off Party
On October 16th, 2014 downtown Fort Lauderdale  hosted the kick-off party for the Broward 100 Project-a centenniel celebration honoring the history of our region through the performance & visual arts! I created chalk mural with ArtServe, Ft. Lauderdale from 5-8pm on Las Olas Blvd across from the Museum of Art near the FAU campus.  http://www.southflorida.com/theater-and-arts/sf-lauderdale-broward-100-block-party-20141015,0,2105088.story

Broward 100

http://www.broward.org/broward100/Pages/default.aspx

BROWARD 100

Color the City Lighthouse Point 
On October 19th, 2014 the Lighthouse Point Cultural Arts committee held our first “Color the City” fence weaving event, beautifying the city through public art workshops. I directed this one day collaboration with kids ages 7-14 in weaving vinyl strips of color into public park fences to beautify our local park! It was a unique, fun family event for the community to enjoy-just in time for the November 1st concert in the park event!

fence weaving

Color the Citycolor the cityLHP fence weaving

 Offerdahl’s Gridiron Grill-off 2014
November 8th, 2014 is the Gridiron Grill-Off Event at the Pompano Beach Amphitheatre. A food, wine & tailgate festival presented by the Taste of the NFL featuring music, celebrity chefs & entertainment throughout the day. What does this have to do with art? I was asked along with a few other local artists to paint a Jack Daniels statue to auction off for charity. Proceeds of the purchased statues benefit John Offerdahl’s Hand Off Foundation, Feeding the Needs of Kids in Crisis.

Gridiron Grill-Off

From the 2013 artist auction for charity

http://gridirongriller.com/home/

BaCA Limelight Event Novemeber 19th

Wednesday evening, Nov 19th Old Pompanos newly renovated art space BACA will hold its monthly art exhibit. I will be creating & directing a large chalk mural collaboration with several of my art students from 4:00 onward! Come out and see some live art while enjoying music, food & entertainment in Pompano’s new revitalized art spot 🙂

bacapompano.org

BACA

pattern

Chalk Mural Course

As many of you know I do street painting festivals throughout the year & to promote events in the local area. I also had the opportunity to teach the art of street painting at the Coral Springs Museum of art this month to a few youngsters ages 9-11. They didn’t know what to expect in a chalk mural class, but they quickly learned this isn’t merely “draw on the street” time for 3 hours. We learned how to mathematically measure & grid an image onto a larger surface by carefully studying proportions & measurements of an image. We began indoors recreating this beautiful lion from Apple wallpaper images in google.
lion

Each student received a 1×1″ cut square from the photo and magnified their square 4 times the size. We used chalk pastel to copy what we saw onto a larger square, then adhered each piece to a larger grid I drew for them.
gridd

The end result was beautiful! They truly had to maintain focus on what they saw in their tiny abstract squares, and had to trust it would add up to form this beautiful puzzle in the end.
grid
progress
done
complete

Day 3-4 we ventured outside to work on our large scale temporary mural as a group. I found an awesome black and white owl illustration by Ben Kwok of deviant art online. We each measured and applied a 1×1″ grid to our 6×8″ images. We then multiplied the owl 20x bigger onto the pavement using chalked string to snap down the straight lines of our grid. We applied box by box, adding bright color to each so they had contrast. Here is our result!
owl
street art
detail
Day3
Day 4
Face
longview
signatures
done

The public arts panel at the Coral Springs Museum of Art is planning to display this piece as apart of a series of decoupaged light boxes around the city of Coral Springs! The girls are excited to see their work on a more permanent display! More to come….