“Freestyle
Faces of Main Street” Mural / Diver and Sea Creatures mural
Main Street Studios, 515 Main Street, Buffalo, NY
Artists: Matthew OGRE Groat,
Chuck Tingley and Max Collins
2012
See also: the opposite wall in this empty lot
| For Matthew Grote, the street artist who
goes by the name of OGRE and
who
collaborated with fellow artists Max
Collins and Chuck Tingley
to
produce downtown's most visible piece of recent street art on the side
of 515 Main St., there's plenty of art to be found here. You just have
to hunt for it. “For some people, and I guess I'm one of those people, it's a method of communication. It's like a secret language or a secret society almost,” Grote said. “Most people don't even look at the stickers, but I do. I see that person is communicating directly to me in that moment, and because I'm paying attention, I get to experience that, whereas most people just blindly walk past it.” Evidence of Grote's artistic alter ego can be found all around the city, in places prominent and hidden, sanctioned and unsanctioned. The same goes for a small but growing group of artists whose work aspires to more than the artfully written tags of the city's handful of experienced graffiti writers. Their art takes strange and often unexpected forms, from wheat-pasted illustrations form-fitted onto concrete pylons to tiles meticulously inserted into the blacktop under cover of night. No tour of Buffalo street art would be complete without a stop at Main Street Studios, where artists OGRE, Chuck Tingley and Max Collins (who on his own has grown into a sort of street art wünderkind) collaborated on one of the more striking murals to grace the streetscape in decades. The piece is a fusion of the three artists' styles, with OGRE's illustrative, cartoonish characters melting into Tingley's more realistic portrait work and Collins' wheatpasted photography of joyful neighborhood characters. The mural, which has grown since its original painting to back of the building facing Washington Street, was meant as a tribute to the neighborhood and has proved to be a consistent draw for the growing arts and business district on the block. |
| See also: Cory Perla, Artists
Transform a Wall on Main Street's 500 Block Artvoice, 07/19/2012 (online
August 2015)
Video: New Mural From Street Artist Ogre in Cobblestone District Artvoice, 06/17/2013 (online August 2015) Video: Making "Freestyle Faces of Main Street" Artvoice on 07/31/2012 (online June 2014) |
  View toward Main Street.   "The piece is a fusion of the three artists' styles, with OGRE's illustrative, cartoonish characters melting into Tingley's more realistic portrait work and Collins' wheatpasted photography of joyful neighborhood characters." - Colin Dabkowski  Artists Ogre, [Chuck] Tingley on Max Collins' wheatpasted photo of man in T-shirt  OGRE's illustrative, cartoonish characters with Collins' wheatpasted photo  OGRE's illustrative, cartoonish characters with Collins' wheatpasted photo  The "hat" celebrates Buffalo architecture in the form of the Liberty Building   OGRE's illustrative, cartoonish art  OGRE's illustrative, cartoonish art  |
Rear of building  Diver and Sea Creatures mural, by Chuck Tingley    Artist: [Chuck] Tingley in 2012   |
