Chalking the Streets

Sidewalk Sam paints the town, or at least the sidewalks, when the weather permits and the mood takes him. People passing a guy who kneels in the street and chalks reproductions of Gainsborough on the pavement may wonder what he's doing down there, but to Sam it's all very clear. "I'm bringing art to the people instead of making them go to dusty old museums to see it," he says. "I'm taking painting out of the hands of the elitist art bureaucracy and putting it back where it belongs."

Sam claims he is a serious artist with a serious purpose, and his credentials provide sufficient evidence for this. As Bob Guillemin, the name he goes by when he's not working in the streets, Sam spent two years at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris after receiving a Masters in Fine Arts at Boston University. Since his return from Paris he has had a one-man show at Brandeis, served as president of the Visual Arts Union in Boston, and exhibited his works at the fashionable Parker 470 Gallery.

Whether Bob Guillemin is a serious artist or not seems beyond the point. Sidewalk Sam is in the streets for fun, and the people who interrupt their busy dashes across Boston to stop and watch him work enjoy their respite from the hubub of city life manage to linger on for a few extra minutes to exchange friendly words with the red-bandanna-topped artist.

"It's a neat kind of a time," Sam says. "Nice things happen. Hundreds of people will stop to see what I'm doing and they'll tell me how much they like it. Then they'll go off and send some more people over to wherever I'm working. The people don't criticize like the experts do, they're only enthusiastic."

A lot of people who watch Sam work drop some dimes or quarters into the bucket that sits next to his workbox-full of Arista Poster Chalk. "I make as much money this way as I did when I used to be a hawker for the Phoenix," Sam tells people who wonder about his income. "It's not much of a living, but it's a decent sort of a life."

It took Sam a full year to get City permission to do his art on the sidewalks of Boston. The problem was, as he explains it, to convince the traffic department, the streets department, the parks department, the police department, and "every which department" that his intentions were "honorable." "It took going through a lot of red tape to show that there's a difference between art and defacing public property."

Sam finally got permission to work in Boston, but hasn't been so lucky in Cambridge. "I'd like to work in Cambridge because a lot of my kind of people hang out over there, but Harvard won't let me and neither will the police." Sam negotiated with the Office for Government and Community Affairs to get clearance for work on the sidewalks of Forbes Plaza, but the Harvard office declined on the grounds that too many people would start painting up the Plaza if Sam were allowed to do his chalk work there.

Harvard not withstanding, Sidewalk Sam lives on. His art does not survive on the streets for more than a week, but one likes to think that his impact on his public is a lasting one.

"I come to see Sam all the time," one businessman said while watching the sidewalk artist in front of Boston City Hall. "He brightens up my day. We need a lot more of this."

People like Sam not so much for the quality of his art--"There's better stuff in the msueums, although I never go see it," one of Sam's fans admits--as they do for the way he approaches his work.

Sam only comes out to work when he knows he's going to have a good time. "In some ways, fun is more important than ending up with a nice product," Sam says. "Human qualities should come first whatever you do. In art you have to be concerned with the primary action independent of the way your product can be used. And the primary action has to be done with openness and friendliness. You see, in business they do it all ass-backwards. Everybody competes with everybody else for a whole year long, and when it's all over at Christmas time they have a party and be nice to each other. You have to start out being nice, then you let your work habits flow from there."

However extraordinary Sidewalk Sam might appear to the general public, it is the conventional art world--the art bureaucracy, as Sam calls it--which is most aware of how unconventional Sam really is. Concrete pavement, after all, is not your everyday medium. Neither are the wooden planks he works with in his East Cambridge studio strictly "accepted."

"One art reviewer," Sam says with obvious delight, "said that my work looks like the crates other artists' work get sent to museums in. That pleased me a lot."

When asked why he likes to work on concrete, Sam says "As an artist I am interested in external relationship: time, place and function. By working on the sidewalks I give my art a permanent place. With an easel it's different. You can't give your work any definite location in space. I make my art a part of its environment and I give it a function in that environment."

The people who stop to admire Sam's work often wonder about the logistical problems of sidewalk-painting. "Who cleans it up?" someone will ask.

"Father Pollution and Mother Nature," Sam will answer.

"How do you practice?" another might query.

"I don't, I just know that I'm ready when I'm ready. It's like riding a bike," he tells them.

"What kind of paintings do you like to do?"

"Everything, anything. I never like to do the same thing twice. I like everything to be a challenge."

"Don't you mind that your paintings don't last very long," a worried aficionado will ask.

"No, I don't mind," Sam will tell him. "My paintings are like old soldiers: they never die, they just fade away."