City Jungle

City Jungle is an attempt to beautify our dull grey urban landscape with huge colorful leaves and flowers seeming to spring to life out from street level. Painted directly onto the metal rails of a common security gate, the image only fully reveals itself to unsuspecting pedestrians at certain angles. The desire is to awaken the community with a vibrant flowering jungle vine by utilizing ultra bright colors, and enabling beauty to exist in a new unexpected and massive context. The goal was to insert common elements from nature into a city setting to give people a welcomed respite from our “urban jungle”.

Location

City Jungle is a mural located on the south side of the Missouri Bank parking garage on 11th Street between Main and Baltimore.

Artist Bio

Robert Tapley Bustamante is a nationally recognized Artist and Designer going by the street name of VisualSoul. His multidisciplinary abilities include illustration, web design, and live-performance painting to some of the biggest rock bands in the world such as The Black Keys, Primus, Grace Potter, Eminem, Yelawolf, Doomtree, and Rakim to name a few. Most recently, he was awarded First Place for his painting at the annual Latino Bravisimo show put on by the City of Lenexa. Rob paints in a very primal and fluid way, along with a distinctive bright color palette, his bold ardent lines grab ahold of you. Creating primarily in a hyper-flattened illustrative style, he works to create soul stirring emotional landscapes that are best described as “beautifully disturbing”. See more at www.visualsoul.com

Along with gracing the cover of KC Magazine’s arts issue, Bustamante has also donated artwork to charitable organizations such as Art For Arthritis, Children’s Mercy Hospital, Sheffield House, MOCSA, Saint Luke’s Hospital, Visual AIDS, and countless private charity events.