Beauty in unexpected places

TWX · Jan 15, 2020

I was in a telecom service entrance room at an elementary school working on their WAN service equipment. While waiting for a restart I saw something out of the corner of my eye...

Just a little thing out of the corner of my eye, really. It was around four feet from the ground, right up against a phone company splice-case, in pencil, and pretty low contrast compared to the dingy telecom backing board it was drawn upon. I managed to get a better picture and to work on the colors and contrast a bit to get this image:

Whomever drew this was quite talented, even if they were copying a photograph or something. To me she looks like the makeup and hair styles popular in the eighties with singers like Bat Benatar and Toni Basil, and to a lesser extent the artwork of Patrick Nagel.

What's weird is that in theory this room should have been off-limits to students. The graffiti (and I almost feel bad calling it that) is low enough that it's most likely a child's work though, and it was very near the door into the space, such that a kid having been confined there for disciplinary reasons might not have ventured far into the room. If the quality of the work had been lower I definitely would have attributed it to a student, but it's quality enough to have required someone with a fairly well developed eye to have made it, especially since it's only around two inches tall.

I also have no idea how long it's been there. As far as I'm aware this school was built in the late seventies or early eighties, and the telecom backer board does not appear to have been repainted since the original phone company splice case was installed. With that style I expect it's been there for decades, but if it's copied from an existing image it would almost make sense to sourced from CD artwork, which would put it in the nineties at the earliest.

Anyway, figured I'd share. Taken with my Kyocera Duraforce XD's built-in camera and Google's Android Camera program.