Californian chalk artist Tracy Lee Stum is in town, to display her own unique brand of street art

Tracy Lee Stum stands at the corner of the amphitheatre at the India Habitat Centre, her eyes scanning every square till she decides the size of her latest work. The Californian chalk artist usually has a sketch ready for her artwork but this time, she’s just had to go with the flow. “I was going to sketch Lord Shiva coming out of a fountain but I was told that there might be a controversy, so I had to change course suddenly,” says Stum. A globally acclaimed street painter, Stum is in Delhi after conducting a 10-day workshop at the annual fest at IIT-Kanpur. The previous year, she’d showcased her unique brand of street art at IIT-Powai and was pleasantly surprised to see that there were many takers for her craft. “I never imagined myself as an artist whose work would be exhibited in a gallery and people would buy it. My work in chalk as a street artist, allows me to interact with people who’re curious, interested and who, even participate sometimes,” says Stum, who decides on re-creating a kind of underground tropical garden, based on her surroundings at the Habitat.

Initially a commercial muralist whose clients included the famed Caesar’s Palace Hotel in Las Vegas, and The Borgata in Atlantic City, Stum drifted to street art in chalk as she was bored of painting murals. That was thirteen years ago. Since then, the artist has gone on to create anamorphic street art. “Anamorphic street paintings are illusionary two-dimensional images that appear to become three-dimensional when viewed from a fixed point through a camera lens. I find that it enhances the performance quality of the piece and creates a direct connection between viewer and artist,” says Stum, who has created exact chalk representations of several paintings of the Italian Renaissance, as well as her own quirky concepts, such as playing Chess with the Dalai Lama and of Napoleon breaking out of a painting. Incidentally, she holds a Guiness Record for the largest street painting by an individual, a work that measured 10 m X 5m.

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