David Zinn is a chalk artist known for leaving anonymous work on sidewalks, under rocks, and in other unexpected places– the lines of the sidewalk become a tightrope for a rabbit to balance on, a sprinkler head becomes the eye of a frog, a pine cone becomes the tail of a cat. His work encourages us to see the beauty in every crack and crevice.
Chalk artist David Zinn is known for leaving anonymous work on sidewalks, under rocks, and in other unexpected places. He walks around Ann Arbor, Michigan with a little wooden box of brightly colored chalk. As David strolls the neighborhood, he looks for features of the streetscape– oddly shaped cracks in the pavement or chunks of brick missing from retaining walls– to use in his drawings of whimsical, mischievous little creatures. The lines of the sidewalk become a tightrope for a rabbit to balance on, a sprinkler head becomes the eye of a frog, a pine cone becomes the tail of a cat.
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David Zinn:
We have this very strange, narrow definition in our minds of what counts as art. The way we seem to conceptualize it is something that is only able to be done by a very small number of people and they have to do it with very strange and arcane or expensive tools that they have to be trained to use properly, but they also have to have this magical spark you can't quite put your finger on, and you have to either have that spark, or you don't, and you have no control over that. You just have to hope that you're one of the people that has it, which makes it very easy for people to think, "Well, I'm definitely not an artist," when the truth of it is we're all doing art all the time.
Shelby Stanger:
When you imagine a piece of art, you might think of a painting on a big canvas, or a ceramic sculpture. It may be mounted in a frame, hanging in your living room, or maybe it's in a gallery with white walls and dramatic lighting. Today's guest, David Zinn, has made a career challenging that exact idea of art. You can't find David's work in a museum and you can't purchase an original to hang in your home. You can only find David's drawings outside in the cracks of the sidewalk, on a brick wall, or at the base of a fire hydrant. I'm Shelby Stanger And this is Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Shelby Stanger:
David Zinn is a street artist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His chalk compositions are found in the nooks and crannies of urban life. He uses features of the streetscape to draw funny little creatures. The lines of the sidewalk become a tightrope for a rabbit to balance on. A sprinkler head becomes the eye of a frog. A pine cone becomes the tail of a cat. David started his career as an artist, creating commercial illustrations. Think textbooks, posters, and logos. But one day, he couldn't pass up the opportunity to enjoy some beautiful weather outside. David Zinn, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
David Zinn:
Thank you. Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, you're a unique guest. You have a wild idea that's unlike a lot of wild ideas we have on the show. You do art in kind of wild places outside.
David Zinn:
Well, I guess it depends on what you consider a wild place, considering probably the sheer majority of the things I've created outdoors were created within walking distance of my house, so it's not exactly the wilderness, but it's a very conventional, urban space, which does have a lot of unique features that I think my art helps to find and celebrate.
Shelby Stanger:
I find what you do so interesting because street art is generally done on walls and they're signed. You do anonymous art on sidewalks, so maybe tell us just how you found sidewalks and why sidewalks are such a great medium.
David Zinn:
I think I have to give a lot of credit to the weather in Michigan, because as many people might not know, we get all of the weather here. Pretty much whatever kind of weather you like will happen at some point over the course of the year in Michigan. But because that's true of all the weather, you're only going to get a few days of that weather, and so the benefit of that is that when we have a day which is your perfect weather for you, there's a strong drive to do whatever you can to get outside and enjoy it because you don't know when it's going to happen again.
David Zinn:
When I was working as a freelance commercial artist, which had become very computerized, so I was working at home, being my own boss. Sitting at a computer on a beautiful day in Michigan, it just did not seem like a good life choice for that day. To sit at a computer indoors just seemed like a moral failing, so since I was a professional artist, albeit a sitting-at-a-computer artist, I told myself in the capacity of being my own boss that, "Okay, maybe if we go outside, but we're making art outside, maybe that's okay. Maybe we can forgive that as a sort of brainstorming for the work we should be doing," so it started as sheer procrastination just to enjoy Michigan weather. What I didn't expect is that drawing on the sidewalk has some advantages, which made art for art's sake much more comfortable for me.
David Zinn:
After years of being afraid of blank canvases and having no interest in painting, going out on the sidewalk and drawing with something that'll wash away in the rain takes away a lot of the stuff, which I now realize was keeping me from being comfortable, spending time making serious art, because first of all, I'm using Crayolas, it's not serious. There's no way you can get a big head about the great masterpiece you're creating with dust on the ground, where a dog will probably pee at some point in the future, so it's childish.
David Zinn:
It's also temporary. Instead of getting permission to paint a wall and then having to make sure I thought out, planned, and executed the best possible mural I could possibly paint on that wall because it would continue to be there indefinitely for all of my neighbors and friends to see and anything wrong with that mural was going to haunt me until it finally got painted over. If I do a bad chalk drawing, all I need to do is spill a cup of water on it, blame it on a child. I can just walk away and no one will know it was me, which is the third advantage that when I first started drawing on the sidewalk, it struck me that as long as no one saw me doing it, no one would know it was me, so all that stuff that we get worked up about after we stop being children of wondering, "What other people will think? Will people make fun of what we drew?", don't worry about it. No one's going to know it was you, so you can just draw whatever makes you happy in that moment without worrying about the future of the art because it doesn't have one.
Shelby Stanger:
This is interesting. When you do TED Talks, in a lot of your talks, you have your art behind you, and on a book, we can see your art. On this podcast, we can't see your art, so I'm hoping you can just take me through how you approach a sidewalk and a manhole or a fire hydrant. Maybe you could just describe some of the things you've created and then what it felt like when you did it.
David Zinn:
It does help remind me to mention the other advantage of drawing on sidewalks, which is what won me over so much, which was that the sidewalk is nowhere near being a blank canvas. There is always something there and the full assortment of specs and cracks and stains and spots on any square of concrete is completely random, just as random as stars in the sky, and luckily, we have an instinct that has a name that sounds like I'm making it up, but I'm not, called "pareidolia."
Shelby Stanger:
Pareidolia?
David Zinn:
Pareidolia is an actual scientific psychological phenomenon that we've probably had since the very beginning that may be one of the superpowers that makes human beings so good at stuff because our brains do not like random information. Our brains are fine-tuned to see patterns anywhere it can find them, so if you show your brain just a bunch of random specs, within seconds, it will start to tell you what might be hiding in those specs, so it'll say, "Oh, wait, that could be a face. Just check to make sure because that looks like it might be a face. If that's a face, we might have to talk to it, so I'm going to check for you and make sure there's no faces here."
David Zinn:
It probably was very important when we weren't at the top of the food chain to know when we were looking at a face, and so we've evolved this skill and now we use it to identify clouds that look like bunnies, or to name constellations and say, "Oh, that one looks like a scorpion. That one looks like a bull. Yeah, that's what it is," and so you can use that when making art on a speckled canvas like the sidewalk because you just connect the dots essentially and you think, "Well, that looks like a nose and that looks like an ear, so let's add some more specs and some more dots and some color. Okay, it's a goblin."
Shelby Stanger:
It's not that David goes out, looking for the perfect place to draw. When he is out walking, a sidewalk, rock, or pipe catches his eye and his brain begins to connect the dots. Sometimes he stops then and there, sketches an idea and starts to color it in, and sometimes it gets logged away in a mental list of spots he wants to come back to. He's used two specs to create the nose of a pig and a grate to draw a barbecue for a small rodent to grill up his dinner. The skill of making something out of nothing is one that he learned from an early age. How did you get into art as a child?
David Zinn:
Well, I think the most important thing to point out is that I got into art at the same time that you got into art, which is at the very beginning of our lives. We all start out as very confident artists because tiny children are confident about everything they do and I think they all have a passion for making marks on things because until you learn that you have the power to make a mark on a surface, before that point in our lives, we're pretty passive creatures. We don't really have any agency at all. We don't really have a lot of control over our environment.
David Zinn:
Although I'm no child psychologist, I'd be willing to bet that the first time we truly achieve the power to change the world, albeit on a small scale, is the first time we make a mark on a wall, and then get in trouble for making a mark on a wall. That's a huge amount of power compared to what we experienced before that, so young children are very good at drawing, at least in their own heads, which is where it counts. We all struggle to maintain that confidence as we get older, so really, we've all started drawing at the same time, I just didn't stop.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that you introduced me to something that I thought was really cool that I'm going to go introduce my nephews to and my niece, a doodle battle.
David Zinn:
Yes.
Shelby Stanger:
You would have these doodle battles with your brother. Can you tell us what a doodle battle is and how we can all do them? 'Cause they're so cool.
David Zinn:
Sure. The doodle battle was an ingenious game created by my parents to keep my brother and I quiet in restaurants. It worked really well. It also, though, this wasn't the goal. It, it saved us from that thing we were just talking about, that point where a lot of us stopped drawing. We start out with a complete confidence that we can change any blank piece of paper into art, but then as we get older, we learn to be more self-conscious, and we care more about what other people might think about how well we do things, which is good for society because it's a form of empathy to care what other people think, but it's very bad for drawing and art and doodling because it makes us hesitate and not want to destroy a blank piece of paper because, "Eh, maybe it's better off blank."
David Zinn:
To keep my brother and I still interested in drawing because drawing is such a blissfully quiet occupation for parents, my father, he invented this game where instead of facing off with the scary blankness of a piece of paper, the doodle battle starts with taking the blank piece of paper in front of you and destroying its blankness right off the bat with a completely meaningless and pointless scribble. The scribble should be as meaningless and pointless as possible because it is not your piece of paper. This is your opponent's piece of paper in the doodle battle. After you put a scribble on the page, you swap papers, and you are now faced with a scribble that you didn't even make. Now, instead of having to decide what to draw on a perfectly blank piece of paper, you have the challenge of seeing if you can make something, anything out of this meaningless scribble.
David Zinn:
It was portrayed as a big battle, as a real challenge, but the truth, which my brother and I never figured out until much later in our lives, is no one ever lost this game because it's always easier to find something you can make out of a scribble. As soon as there's a limitation, as soon as there's something already on the page that you have to deal with, your brain is very happy to come up with solutions for that, and so the doodle battle is actually a very effective way to get over that obstacle of not knowing what to draw because of course you don't know what to draw when there's a million things to choose from, but when it has to be something that makes use of this ridiculous scribble, yeah, it's like five, six things. We can pick from five, six things.
Shelby Stanger:
You have a story of finding unexpected art as a little kid that you thought was just meant for you. It was about an earless Mickey Mouse. Can you maybe just tell that story?
David Zinn:
Oh yeah, sure. It was a very important part of my life. This was something I was lucky enough to experience Ann Arbor in the 1980s that I was walking down the street like you do in Ann Arbor and saw in the afternoon a stencil, a piece of graffiti on the ground, which is already unusual, like you said, usually on walls, but in the middle of the sidewalk, someone had stenciled a Mickey Mouse head but without the classic Mickey mouse ears, which seemed a weird thing to leave out, why would you do Mickey mouse's head, but not give him ears? It was completely confusing. It was unsigned. It was just there in the middle of the street.
David Zinn:
I was very lucky that a few weeks later I walked down the same street at night and got to see that this was placed very carefully so that the shadow of the double parking meter nearby cast by the street lamp, which of course always cast the shadow in the same place every night to fall exactly where it needed to be, to create ears for this Mickey Mouse head. It was such a revelation and I feel so lucky that I got to see it first without its full meaning, to have no explanation, to help me understand why this was here, just the delightful confusion. It was like a good setup to a good joke to then walk back like, "Oh, okay, you got me. You got me. I thought this was just some insane thing and yet you put so much thought into where you put it."
David Zinn:
It reveals, you get this, at least to me, I get this lovely vignette in my imagination of who was walking down this street before this was here and saw that parking meter shadow and thought, "You know what? This has got to be a Mickey Mouse," and then did it. I think it creates a good model of at least my preferred kind of art to both make and experience is where someone has a thought, which I think many of us have probably all of us have, like, "Oh, boy, you know what would be really cool? That would be really cool," but then these artists are the ones that say, "You know that crazy idea you think would be really cool? I'm doing that. I'm going to do it because someone should do it so it can exist."
Shelby Stanger:
Before seeing the airless Mickey, young David had never thought of art as something you just happen upon outside the context of a museum or gallery. Years later, he's recreating that sense of wonder with his own fantastical scenes. You don't need to be a kid to appreciate the small, unexpected worlds that David has hidden beneath our feet. When we come back, David talks about how he comes up with his ideas and he tells us more about the creatures he draws.
Shelby Stanger:
Chalk artist David Zinn is known for leaving anonymous works on sidewalks under rocks and in other unexpected place. He walks around Ann Arbor, Michigan with a little wooden box of brightly colored chalk. As David strolls the neighborhood, he looks for oddly shaped cracks in the pavement or chunks of brick missing from retaining walls. Once he finds a suitable nook or cranny, he turns it into a colorful, jolly, sometimes mischievous little creature. Your creatures really have big personalities.
David Zinn:
Thank you.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, they're great.
David Zinn:
I thank you on their account.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you come up with them? Are they in your head? Are they influenced by like comics you read or TV shows?
David Zinn:
I think it would be yes to all of those things since they are improvised based on what's already there. Not only do I not have a plan before I start, to be honest, I often don't even have a plan after I start, so it's just a matter of having a conversation with the specs and cracks and things to find out what it thinks it wants to be. It probably is being influenced by everything I've ever seen, every comic book I ever read, but they're all mashed up together and coming out as this creature I've never met before.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you do this? Is there a time of day you go out? Do you just say, "Okay, it's 3:00, I'm going to go get my chalk and I'm going to go out in the city"? I mean, I know you've done it for years now, so you're an expert, but when you first started, how did you get yourself to do it?
David Zinn:
It hasn't changed much. It's still very much an amateur activity, which is good because ideally, in the best-case scenarios, it happens while I'm walking somewhere else, so I'm typically walking down to the post office or walking to the library or walking up to the grocery store. When you walk, you get to look around at stuff, and if you walk and you're shy. Like I am, you look at the ground a lot so you don't accidentally make eye contact with people, and if you do that, ironically, you make eye contact with things in the ground that want to talk to you, so most of the things I've drawn in this neighborhood around my house were drawn when I was on my way to do something else, and luckily had the time to stop.
David Zinn:
That said, since you raised the question of times of day, now that I depend so much on this as a therapeutic activity, I get really unsettled if a lot of time goes by and I haven't gone out to meet with my imaginary friends, which unfortunately can be a challenge when it gets to be wintertime and it's 17 degrees outside and there might be snow on the ground, so eventually there, there are times when it has to be a plan of either waiting until it's as warm as it's going to get, so I get strangely excited in January when it gets above 30 degrees, like "Yes, not freezing outside, let's go out and draw something," or when the snow gets shoveled enough that I see bare sidewalk again, because I can't draw on snow, but I can draw on the sidewalk, no matter how cold it gets. Curiously, there becomes this shift that I find very interesting because as I already admitted, I started doing this to shamelessly enjoy nice weather, and yet I'm so dependent on this now that my concept of nice weather has expanded dramatically.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you just tell me an example of something you recently drew and what that was like?
David Zinn:
Well, yesterday was a very interesting day. We had a very cloudy day, which this will sound strange, but I love a cloudy day because the drawings I'm doing and especially the 3D trick that I'm trying to pull off when I do these drawings doesn't really work well in direct sunlight, and so on a sunny day, I have to hide on the shady side of the street and hope that the sun doesn't move too much before I finish what I'm doing. It's a weird thing to be actively avoiding the sunny side of the street, but that means if we have a good cloudy day, all bets are off, I can draw anywhere I want. I actually have a mental list in my head of a lot of places where I wanted to draw something on a sunny day and couldn't and they're all up there just waiting.
David Zinn:
That's what happened yesterday. There's a street corner in Ann Arbor that is not close to any tall buildings and is usually in the sun every day, so when I realized it wasn't going to be sunny all day, I figured, "Okay, that's where I'm going." The problem with a cloudy day is it's very rarely just a cloudy day. Cloudy days are usually turning into something else. Sometimes they turn into sunny days, but yesterday was one of those days where the weather forecast could not predict when it was going to rain, it was just going to at some point.
David Zinn:
I did have an experience that I've had a few times where I was really enjoying this tiny drawing. It was the size of one brick that happened to have some scratches on it that looked like a pig face, so I was making a little hole for this pig to live in. Then I saw drips of rain start falling on its face and I wasn't finished yet. If you don't finish these drawings, it's kind of like not finishing a conversation. It feels very unsettling, so I had to protect it with myself until the rain passed. It was only going to be a few minutes of drizzle, and so I leaned over my little pig friend to try to keep him dry until the rain stopped. Then it started raining immediately afterwards, so I'm one of the only people on the planet who saw this piece of art before it was destroyed.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you repeat them? Do they take a life of their own? Or are they different every time?
David Zinn:
Well, some do repeat, which is actually the most surprising thing, considering that these are all improvised drawings without a plan, so it does lend a weird belief in the back of my head that these must be monsters that like me because they come back.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you name them?
David Zinn:
Well, the naming started out originally the ones that are my best friends, the flying pig, whose name is Philomena, and Sluggo is the green monster that I draw a lot. They ended up with names mainly because kids who watched me draw on the street were very upset that they did not have names. Sluggo is called Sluggo because he kind of looks like a slug and it's the first thing that came to mind. Philomena is called Philomena for more mysterious reasons because she is a flying pig.
David Zinn:
I realized after I started drawing flying pigs that they're a very important symbol because of the phrase that we use of "That will happen when pigs fly," which is an inherently mean-spirited phrase. I don't know why, but for some reason it is used exclusively to tell people that their dreams aren't going to happen. Because it's such a negative phrase, the symbol of a flying pig is an inherently positive symbol, and people have actually pointed to it and said to their kids, "You see that? You know what that means. It means anything can happen today." I like that. But just calling her a flying pig wasn't going to satisfy children, so those two come around a lot.
David Zinn:
Generally speaking, almost all of these creatures have names, but only because of the internet. There's many places where you can't really just share a photograph, like if you just post a photograph on Twitter, all people see is a gibberish link. When I used to post just photographs on Tumblr way back in the day, if someone liked it, I'd get an alert from Tumblr that said, "So-and-so likes your photo," and no matter what photo it was, it just said "your photo," and I'm like, "Which photo? Which photo?", so I started giving them texts to go along with them just to keep them straight so I knew which photo was which, and so the tweet had something in it that would make people curious, and so it's become a habit to write these one-sentence stories that go with each picture. It's not necessarily the beginning of a story, it's definitely not the whole story, but it's some part of what's happening in the picture.
Shelby Stanger:
Philomena is a bubblegum-pink pig with little angel wings and she's famous on TikTok. No, really. David has more than 2.8 million followers on TikTok and more than 770,000 followers on Instagram. On his social media posts, you can read comment after comment of followers, thanking him for bringing joy to their feeds. What do you hope people take away from your art?
David Zinn:
There's a couple of things. I hope that my drawings are cheerful enough, and I've faith that they tend to be cheerful because I'm usually drawing them to cheer myself up, so I'm hoping it continues to do that job, but I also hope that because this is art being made with incredibly simple tools and there's no magic to what I'm doing, doing art in public, creating art in public purposefully demystifies the making of art. It's just doodling. It's just very fancy doodling. If you see a chalk drawing that I'm doing and you think, "I'd like to do that," I'll give you a piece of chalk. Do it right now. There's a whole bunch of empty space around anywhere I'm drawing that nobody has drawn on yet, and I can't cover that space myself, so I'll be very happy if this makes a lot of people think, "Yeah, I could do that."
Shelby Stanger:
Any advice on going after your wild idea? What do you tell people?
David Zinn:
Wow. Well, I think there is something to be said, and I think this is something that, because my work done in this way has given me a surprisingly deep affection for, an appreciation of very small, very mundane places, there are moments and locations that are very important to me, and I know they're never going to be particularly important to anybody else, but that's the thing. There are specific cracks in the sidewalk in Ann Arbor, Michigan that are of almost mystical significance to me and me alone. Now, I find that worth chasing. It's no longer about whether anyone else likes my art. It's no longer about whether the places I go are the places that are considered to be beautiful and important because when you chase the things which are notoriously famous, you are now doing more and more just what other people do, and your best hope of actually walking somewhere where no one else has ever walked is to just go somewhere where no one else has been. The path you choose is going to make sense because no one else could have taken the steps that you took to get there.
Shelby Stanger:
For those of us living in urban and suburban areas, it's easy to tune out the little things we see every day. David chooses a different approach. Through the lens of his art, David sees his neighborhood with a curious, joyful perspective, and he makes it easy for all of us to do the same. David's adventure may be a little closer to home, but like he says, anything can be wild as long as it's wild to you. David, thank you so much for talking with me. It was such a pleasure. You gave me some great perspective on creativity, on art, and just on finding ordinary things that spark joy. You can get David's book called Chance Encounters anywhere books are sold and you can follow David on Facebook at David Zinn Illustration, on Instagram at @DavidZinn, and on TikTok at @StreetArtByDavidZinn. That's spelled David Zinn, D-A-V-I-D Z-I-N-N. I highly recommend following him.
Shelby Stanger:
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Chelsea Davis and our associate producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we appreciate when you follow the show, when you rate it, and when you review it wherever you listen, and remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.