Las Vegas

Posted on by Thor

With sketchbook in hand I walked down the Las Vegas Strip towards the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Across the street a large Statue of Liberty wore a Golden Nights sports jersey and I had to sketch. The jersey took 4 straight days to make, weighs 600 pounds and is 28 feet tall. It took six hours to get her dressed. The back dons the number 17 and the name Budweiser. It is a bit sad that she has been turned into an advertising billboard for beer.

Also in the scene was Ellis Island and the Empire State Building. I used to work in the Empire State building and the large windows could be opened and I liked to sit on the ledge of the window looking out and straight down. I liked to watch the window washers at work. They would snap a restraining harness to a latch on the outside of the window frame and then lean out to squeegee the window. No that is a job that took some real guts.

This replica decorates the New York, New York Casino. The United States Post Office decided to print a postage stamp using the face of the statue of Liberty. In stead of using the face of the statue in New York, they used the face of this Las Vegas statue created by artist Robert S Davidson.

Davidson, born and raised in Las Vegas, completed the Statue of Liberty replica in 1996 for MGM Resorts International, when the casino operator opened its latest theme casino New York-New York. Davidson said in court documents that he
wanted to give his replica a face that was “a little more modern, a
little more feminine” and looked for inspiration from a photograph of
his mother-in-law, Lucille Schwartz.

 

Davidson sued the post office for copyright infringement. The stamp was first issued in December of 2010. About 4 billion copies of the stamp were printed by USPS.  The post office mistook
the face for the statue that has stood in New York Harbor since 1886. Getty images was paid $1200 for the right to use the photo on the stamp. The stamp generated about $2.1 billion in sales for the Postal Service, according to court filings. The artist was awarded nearly $3.6 million in 2018 by a federal
court that ruled the U.S. Postal Service infringed his copyright when it
mistakenly used an image of his statue on the stamp.

The only thing that keeps this scene from looking like it could be NYC is that large palm tree to the right of Lady Liberty. The tree looks about as tall as she is. This statue is about half the size of the original in New York Harbor. This replica took 11 months to complete. Hopefully I will be safe for having turned my eye towards Lady Liberty. To date I have made $0 for having sketched her.

Eiffel Tower on the Strip

Posted on by Thor

The Eiffel Tower on the Las Vegas strip is part of the Caesars Casino in Paris Las Vegas (3655 Las Vegas Boulevard South

Las Vegas , NV 89109). At the top of the tower is a viewing deck located 46 stories up in the half scale replica of the world-famous Paris, France landmark.

As an artist, all the magnificent architectural detail was fun to draw. As I worked on this sketch, a guy was going though his bag in front of me. He seemed really upset that he had picked up the wrong sun glasses. The impression I got was that he lifted the glasses, threw then in his bag and walked out of the store. He had stolen the wrong brand. I should have done a quick sketch of his face  in case the police were interested but I was in the midst of all the detail on this sketch and didn’t want to side track.

This was done several blocks closer to the Mandalay Bay Hotel where the mass shooting happened. My sketching experience was getting me used to huge throngs of people pressed together on the side walks that were separated from traffic with cement stanchions. On this day I made it as far as the New York, NY facades one block from Mandalay Bay where shots were fired on a crowd on October 1, 2017 killing 58 and wounding 413 others. About one month after the shooting, all of the preservable memorial items were gathered, boxed and taken to the Clark County Museum, (1830 S. Boulder Highway, Las Vegas Nevada) to become part of the museum’s permanent collection. The county has cataloged more than 12,000 items that were used to create
makeshift memorials following the Oct. 1 shooting. On October 1, 2018 one year after the shooting the strip went dark at 10:01PM in remembrance of the 58 victims and hundreds injured in the senseless shooting.

The moments during and just after the shooting rampage were recorded on multiple cell phones. For some the effects of that night will last a lifetime. Memorial sites sprang up but most concert goers were from out of town. And the hotels on the strip wanted to get back to business right away. On September of 2019, In the spirit of helping the community heal, MGM Resorts announced that the 15-acre plot where 22,000 people gathered for a country music
festival that ended in the largest mass shooting in U.S. history is
being converted to a community center and parking lot. In coming weeks and months, Las Vegas visitors will notice construction
activity near the shooting site, which has remained unused since the
tragedy. The company said it will also support any effort to install a permanent 1 October Memorial.

Jill’s Cash Box at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts

Posted on by Thor

Jill’s Cash Box is a Country Band that performed on the lawn in front of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts from 5 p.m.to 7 p.m. on  Saturday night in April. The lawn was surrounded by a temporary metal fence for the occasion. To get inside this free concert, I had to go through a metal detector and bag search. My art supplied always raise suspicions so it takes me a bit longer to get through. This concert was two months prior to the June 12, 2916 attack on the Pulse Nightclub that left 49 people dead and forever changed our city.

AT the time of this country concert I thought all the heightened security was crazy since less that 24 people attended the concert in their folding chairs. However now looking back after Pulse and the mass shooting in Las Vegas I see that this is the new reality. Perhaps this amount of security wasn’t actually enough. I am in Las Vegas right now and once I finish this article I will be going to sketch the makeshift memorial set up by the Mandalay Bay Hotel. At that mass shooting the set up was very similar to this concert. There were security fences and bag checks to get into the concert but the entire field was exposed to the elevated rooms of the hotel across the street. This lawn in Orlando is also exposed to the Grand Bohemian hotel right across the street.

At the vigil held for victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in this same grass field, there were no fences, no bag checks and no metal detectors. Concerns that a copycat shooter might attack the candle light vigil must have been a very real concern but inclusion, acceptance and trusting love were far more over riding themes that night. I  found myself scanning roof tops and there were police snipers to be found. The new reality is that we can be shot by a gun toting lunatic at any time, and stripping down and being searched is not really any form of protection. In the Federal Courthouse, covering the Noor Salman Trial, I walked through the building holding my shoes, belt and possessions since I had to go through a second metal detector and search right outside the courtroom. Going to the bathroom required its own search. Security footage showed the gunman entered Pulse with his assault riffle up and ready to shoot . He walked right past security, entered the club and started immediately shooting people at point blank range.

Was Jill’s Cash Box a good concert? I honestly don’t remember. But it was certainly a more innocent time. One of the memorial phrases to come from the Las Vegas mass shooting is “Country Strong.”