Nuances and Layers

Today I framed a couple photos and pictures. For my birthday I received one of the best gifts of all, the gift of art that a friend made. It is an eerie image of Martin Luther King Jr., stenciled with spray paint on funky green and brown wallpaper. Shades of purple and black, which make up his face, seem to lock in the spirit of the holiday, and, along with it, the feel of graffiti and streetscape and sadness, like an abandoned stretch of decorated concrete under a bridge in a gloomy area of town. It is the face that people will recognize, the famous photo of him that seems to be used most often. The spray paint gives it an ethereal, misty look, and a star kind of pattern is spray-painted over the wallpaper, which has a subtle raised and shiny texture of fans or feathers.