State Of The Evening ...

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

                   ~ Oscar Wilde  

                                  ~1854-1900

 The State Theatre sparkles like a jewel in downtown Easton, Pennsylvania on a chilly November evening on Northampton Street.

State Theatre, originally known as Neumeyers Vaudeville House and now the State Theatre Center for the Arts, is an historic theatre. The building began to take its present form in 1910, when modified from a bank building to a vaudeville house. The building was extensively modified in 1926, to include a larger auditorium, balcony and lush decorations. At that time it was renamed “The State.” The building is asymmetrical with a cut stone Beaux-Arts style façade and large overhanging marquee.

Beaux-Arts Architecture is a very rich, lavish and heavily ornamented classical style taught at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in the 19th century. The term “Beaux Arts” is the approximate English equivalent of  “Fine Arts.”

State Theatre was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

 

In The Key Of Cool ...

"Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both.

But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz."

                                       ~ Louis Armstrong

                                                   ~ 1901-1971 

 

Silhouetted hands bring a hot jazz number

to a crescendo in the key of cool in this image,

a portion of a jazzy mural in Easton, Pennsylvania

that I shot on a chilly November day. This is my

artistic interpretation of the mural image. 

 

I captured this cool mural of jazz silhouettes of musicians on the façade of the Hotel Lafayette as they literally paint the town. The mural features the shadows of musicians on keyboard, saxophone, trumpet and other jazz instruments against bright colors.

The mural is an Easton Main Street Initiative public art project created in 2012. It is a gift of the Easton Rotary Service Foundation in memory of Ted Pierce, who was the station manager of WEST radio, an outstanding and devoted citizen. He was a generous benefactor of the Easton community and Easton Rotary Service Foundation, as well as an exemplary journalist and key reporter on the Nuremburg War Crimes Trial for the Armed Forces Network. Pierce left a large amount of money for the Rotary Club to use on Easton-based projects.

           

The mural was designed and painted on the Fourth Street side of the building by the Freehand Mural Group of Easton.