Crystal Snowscape

artist David Guinn

Crystal Snowscape by David Guinn. Completed 1999. Restored in 2018. Photo by Steve Weinik.

  • location 629 S 10th Street
  • Neighborhood

    Center City

  • completion date

    December 01, 1999

About the Mural 

Part of David Guinn’s Seasons series, the artist took advantage of two walls to create a scene with two different street perspectives.  The idea for snowscape came from a Pieter Breughel (1525-69, Flemish) painting entitled Hunters in the Snow.  The soft, organic shapes of the trees, based on the trees in the Breughel painting, were added to balance the hard geometry of the rest of the composition.

In November 2015, Philadelphia's Klip Collective animated Crystal Snowscape through projection mapping. Photo by Steve Weinik.

Although Guinn plans the basic structure of murals ahead of time, he likes to invent on the wall, saving decisions about the exact shape and color of his faceted squares until he is actually painting them to absorb the neighborhood colors.  Guinn added the skier because he felt the composition needed an emotional center.  Guinn lightened and warmed the colors at the end of the central street in response to the building colors nearby (orange and yellow).

Sponsor 

KPMG