Shadows Casting on the Shore

Craig Cree Stone

Completed in April 1995 by artist Craig Cree Stone, Shadows Casting on the Shore explore the historic and contemporary character of the Belmont Shore community through a series of images that are cast from parking meters, imprinted onto bus pads and sandblasted or carved into existing median boulders. “Spanning a fourteen block length along Second Street in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach this project has been the subject of over forty press articles and reviews. The primary elements of the work are illusionistic “shadows” that appear to be cast from parking meters and onto/into the cement sidewalk. The secondary elements are pictographs and large “shadows” that either extend up the walls of buildings or cover large concrete median and bus pads along Second Street. The work is comprised of over eighty individual images stained, painted, inlaid or carved into stone. All of the images were suggested by community members and used as a basis to generate the images for the project reflecting the history of the area and the character of the community. Funded with parking meter revenues, this “Street Art” project was inspired by the images created by the actual shadows of the newly installed parking meters and the observation that the new concrete sidewalks were easily stained. The artist created a unique process to stain the concrete with a fuzzy shadow-like edge to create a unique sense of place with a sequential site-specific artwork that inserts a bit of surrealism into the popular beach community of Long Beach know as Belmont Shore, the place with the shadows casting from parking meters.”