Karl Haendel's Jottings, Writ Large, on a SoHo Wall

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: May 7, 2009

It started with a simple doodle, the kind we all make while talking on the telephone or watching television.

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Art Production Fund

A digital rendering of Karl Haendel's "Scribble," which is to be constructed later this month at 441 Broadway in SoHo.

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But for Karl Haendel, a 32-year-old artist in Los Angeles, these haphazard scribbles were the beginning of something else. "I wondered what would happen were I to blow one of them up really big," he said in a telephone interview from his studio. "That's when I realized they were the seeds of large abstractions."
So when Doreen Remen and Yvonne Force Villareal — founders of the nonprofit Art Production Fund, which presents art around New York — approached Mr. Haendel to see if he would be interested in creating a public art project in the city, he already had the idea worked out in his head.
"We were both excited by Karl's work because it is accessible yet layered," Ms. Remen said. What she and Ms. Villareal had in mind, she said, was "a high-impact, low-budget" project, something that would cost less than $20,000.
For two months they scouted possible sites. "It was challenging," Ms. Remen said. "We wanted to find a place that would donate a wall, but it had to be the right wall."
By that she meant a surface on which painters could create Mr. Haendel's "Scribble" — a black-and-white composition that rises several stories — by hand.
They finally settled on 441 Broadway at Howard Street in SoHo, home to a wall that is part of a prewar building facing an empty lot. The site is owned by members of the Laboz family, Manhattan developers who support contemporary art. They had already donated a space on Wooster Street to the Art Production Fund for its APF Lab, which presents installations and performances. (The rest of the money for Mr. Haendel's project has come from other private collectors.)
Many decorated buildings in Manhattan involve either premade vinyl images applied like wallpaper or spray-painted graffiti designs. But "this isn't graffiti — get out a can of spray paint, mark your territory and get away with it," Mr. Haendel said of his project. He wanted his work executed by old-school craftsmen.
From May 19 to 23 a team of painters from Colossal Media, a Brooklyn company that specializes in outdoor advertisements painted on walls, will be making Mr. Haendel's work to his specifications.
The handmade feeling is crucial to the artwork, Mr. Haendel said.
"It's goofy and humorous and small," he explained. "But this kind of mark making is a simple gesture people can relate to on a basic level. It doesn't take itself so seriously."

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