Can paintings live outside? Would it be possible to have a garden live within a painting? In an exhibition called Inside Outside, Fabric 8 challenged local artists Daniel James Burt and Romanowski to re-think painting from an outdoor perspective. The artists jumped right in (jumped right out?) in creating unique indoor and outdoor found object and plant assemblage and sculptures.

Beautifully integrated into the artwork are bits of chia pet plants and air plants that derive their water from the air, requiring little to no maintenance. The artists collaborated with Flora Grubb Gardens to determine exactly what type of plants would be best suited to this new art environment. “We do not have green thumbs,” Fabric 8 co-founder Olivia Ongpin explained, “So we knew that if we could keep these pieces alive, anyone could.”

Fabric 8 started out as an Internet business selling unique items by urban independent designers. Their small retail store located beneath a San Francisco Victorian residence in the Mission has now expanded to include a gallery in the back as well as a backyard garden gallery. When I stopped by earlier today, they were preparing the space for a wedding reception over the weekend.

My old college bud, Kenny Scharf, is arguably the original green artist – a brilliant guy from L.A. who began his career nabbing trash from the streets of Manhattan and embellishing old appliances with his phantasmagorical, Fifties-inspired, squiggly creatures and symbols.

Working alongside East Village graffiti muralists like Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat, his uproariously spacey icons were quickly embraced by Andy Warhol and other enthusiasts with clout. He quickly rose to the ranks of artist superstar.

Scharf  conveyed his erumpent celeb status to me when I caught up with him back in 1984. I was covering festivals and parades during my first big break as a TV reporter in Central Pennsylvania.

“I’m really big now, Luanne,” he informed me. “I mean really big.”

Oh, yeah? Well, I just downed my 10th funnel cake at another Keystone country shindig, so there!

A few decades later, the prolific, globally-acclaimed pop star is still doing what he does best: painting, scavenging beaches for trash for his sculptures, performing at his recycled Brooklyn live-work space and enjoying the fanfare of a new retrospective book, Kenny Scharf by Rizzoli.

Oh, and another thing he’s still doing – riding his bike instead of driving whenever possible. It’s been his favorite mode of transport for the past 30 years. In fact, he was riding with cell in ear when I caught up with him, yet again, huffing only so slightly. Quite admirable for 51.

“I ride my bike everywhere,” he says. “I live in Brooklyn and ride over the bridge and back, sometimes twice a day. Why drive a few blocks when you can walk or ride?”

His biking is admirable not only for cutting fuel emissions, but also for keeping him as fit as the new crop of young artists who form his entourage in New York. They include Daniel Heidkamp, who encouraged Scharf to lend his magic to one of the many empty commercial storefronts hit by the recession.

Landlords have been luring in artists to keep up appearances in the darkened spaces with that edgy, gallery feel. According to the New York Times, the goal is to deter crime while attracting tenants who can afford the rent. Scharf agreed to be part of a group show in one of these pop-up galleries, finding it exciting to be part of the scene.

“I said I didn’t have work I could donate, but I could do something directly on the wall like a spray painting,” he told me. “I will do that pretty much anywhere. So I did my spray painting and there was a photographer and a reporter from the New York Times waiting for me there.”

The unexpected coverage boosted the opening of the show, entitled ‘Too Big to Fail: Big Paintings’.

“I went and it was nice, like a bunch of 20-something artists,” he says. “I liked the work and to be part of the youngsters [scene].”

I assured him he’s still a youngster, too. After all, I still sense a wide-eyed wonder in his current work that merges organic earth elements with sensual, knobby creatures in the perspective of a damaged Cable Guy way over-exposed to TV Land stimuli. The familiarity of his fantasies make us laugh as we drink in the irony and nostalgia.

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Today, the high-energy Scharf divides his time between homes in Brazil and NYC.

He enjoyed a recent show of his paintings (above) and sculptures at the Honor Fraser Gallery in Venice, Ca. At home in Brooklyn, he lives in a basement studio called the Cosmic Cavern A-Go-Go, which moonlights as a psychedelic nightclub for parties and performance art.

“I have been working with garbage and refuse for all these years, and the Cavern is made out of found objects from the street that I pull in and decorate,” he explains.

The Cavern attracts a following of young visionaries (like the space Cadette with Kenny, below) eager to talk trash with the painter and celebrate his lighthearted sensibilities.

“We have actual performances when the music stops playing,” Scharf tells me about the club. “People appear as art objects and they go all out. It’s about being inclusive and everyone being allowed to be a part of it.”

The lucky patrons who come unadulterated get a quick Scharfian make-over.

“I just paint their faces,” he says. “Then they sweat it off dancing.”

Guess we can’t really call that sustainable craft, but the artist himself is enduring longer than most of his peers, many of whom passed on years ago from AIDS (like Haring).

“I miss my dead friends very much, but I’m used to not having them around,” Scharf says.

Instead, he surrounds himself with their art (he used to trade his for theirs) and his golden memories, while forging ahead in a brave, new and green world. A world where the resourceful painter is as much at home in Orbit City as George Jetson.

“I’ve been an eco-artist for a long time,” he tells me. “Though I’m not some puritan. I use spray paint; I take airplanes; I make sculptures out of resin when I need to, but I’m very conscious of it.”

I believe you, Kenny. You are really big and you are really conscious. Anyway, it’s not easy to spray paint with vegetable dye and ride a bike to Brazil. But if you could, you would.

Main Image: New York Times

Image One: Kenny Scharf

Image Two: RizzoliUsa

Image Three: Honor Fraser Gallery

Images Three, Four, Five : Kenny Scharf

If you’re taking a stroll through the English landscape…Andy Goldsworthy wants to stop you in your tracks.

He’s a British sculptor, photographer and committed environmentalist, and he likes arranging things. He turns random piles of stones into gravity-defying structures and scattered leaves into dazzling gradiated rainbows. He tracks lines and curves upon the ground where none should exist, stacks ice in the unlikeliest of places, and puts patterns and colors into the landscape that would make any onlooker rub their eyes. And the true magic of his work is that for a second – just for a second – you believe it’s the work of Nature. What would your first thought be if you encountered these in the wild?

“Everything has the energy of its making inside it.”

- Interview, The Guardian, 2007.

Goldsworthy’s tools of choice? Anything to hand (including his hands). In recent years he’s used power-tools for his trickier creations – and employed the help of experts such as dry stone wallers. Primarily, though, his real tools are gravity, wind, rain and the beautiful detritus of the natural world. And patience – lots of it.

“I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.”

- Interview, The Telegraph, 2007.

And if you’re wondering what Goldsworthy’s view of his natural medium is? In a word – ambivalent.

“The landscape is often perceived as pastoral, pretty, beautiful – something to be enjoyed as a backdrop to your weekend before going back to the nitty-gritty of urban life. But anybody who works the land knows it’s not like that. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful.”

- Interview, The Telegraph, 2007.

“A lot of my work is like picking potatoes…you have to get into the rhythm of it.”

- Interview, The Guardian, 2007.

Andy Goldsworthy‘s online catalogue preview , volume 1 (1976-1986).

See more natural and environmental art, fascinating earthworks, and additional Andy Goldsworthy art.

Images via: pixdaus; tintintin; nonpareil; barcar; dullhunk; Cass Sculpture Foundation; Chris Wright.