Meet the Jogging Giotto: This Runner ‘Draws’ Elaborate Pictures By Mapping Carefully Planned Routes on a Running App

Being an artist is typically a
pretty stationary profession. Maybe you’ll walk a few steps to the
easel, then a few more to the rack of paint. 

But that’s not the case for
artist Lenny Maughan, who racks up as many as 30 miles to make one
sketch. For Maughn, the streets of San Francisco are his canvas;
his feet the brush. And the resulting image actually appears
on Strava, a fitness app that records runners’ times and
charts their routes.

Last month, Maughan’s work went
viral when a friend shared on Reddit the artist’s latest effort, an
exacting line portrait of Frida Kahlo, whose likeness Strava mapped
from Maughan’s run. The run spanned 28.93 miles, 3,500 feet of
elevation change, and took more than six hours.

Maughan, who has lived in San
Francisco for more than two decades, has been making his running
pictures for more than three years now. The planning sometimes
takes as long as the execution. First, he prints out several paper
maps of San Francisco and then draws his way through the little
streets like a maze on the back of a cereal box. Sometimes he’ll go
through several copies before he finds a route that
works.

“I have to plan them very
precisely in advance,” Maughan recently told Runner’s
World. “I just
dream up shapes of things—random, unexpected, timeless, widely
recognizable, often kitschy or quirky things to ‘draw’ using the
city streets as my canvas. Either I’ll look for patterns in a
street map or I’ll try to make a shape fit within the lines of the
streets, and then I sketch it out on a paper map with a
highlighter. It goes through several iterations before I get it
just right.”

Maughan’s first image was the
Vulcan hand signal from Star Trek, inspired by the death of Spock
actor Leonard Nimoy. “I
just printed out a paper map and sketched a hand shape along Market
Street and the other fingers, thumb and wrist came pretty
easily,” he told the
Guardian. After
that came a maze-like television. (The first TV was created in San
Francisco in 1927.) “The larger you go, the more fine-tuned you can
make the shape.”

Since then, his work has grown
increasingly complex. There’s a taco, a rose, a heart, a pair of
hands holding chopsticks. There’s a martini glass, a guitar, and
the Starship Enterprise. There’s the busty woman that appears on
the backs of truck mudflaps. Once, Maughan even “drew” a
self-portrait of himself running. In total, his portfolio is now
some 50 pictures deep. 

See more of Maughan’s
pictures below.

The post Meet the Jogging Giotto: This Runner ‘Draws’
Elaborate Pictures By Mapping Carefully Planned Routes on a Running
App appeared first on artnet News.