People We Meet: Chalking for 20 years

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On a clear May day, Nikolas Larson surveyed the intersection of Shotwell Street and 25th Street, a bit disappointed. It was too windy to chalk.

Since 2010, when he moved to the Mission, this corner of the neighborhood has been his “outdoor studio:” A place where he comes to create about once a week. 

“This is just the nearest good sidewalk from where I live,” he said. 

A lifelong artist originally from Monterey, California, Larson found his affinity for chalk art two decades ago, messing around with pieces that a friend’s kid had left on the sidewalk. He occasionally gets a paid gig but, for the most part, chalking has been a twenty-year hobby and his way of contributing to the Mission’s vibrant public-art scene. He also works with pen and ink, but chalking gives him something extra.  

“Often, an artist is toiling in obscurity in their house or studio or whatever, and nobody really knows what they’re doing. So the public art nature of it is something I really enjoy, and talking to the locals,” he said.

These days, he works in two primary forms: Geometric mandalas and images of mythical dragons and warriors. The design he had to abandon to the wind was a dragon and the profile of a woman. 

To create a mandala, he finds a uniform segment of sidewalk with rough grooves to trap the tiny chalk filaments. He maps out the angles of his innermost layer of the mandala, like petals protruding from a flower. Then he traces his first lines in Crayola chalk using cardboard cutouts, flipping the pieces to create symmetry. He blends the chalk with the finger of a vinyl glove, then waves an old lid from a plastic bin to scatter the chalk dust. 

“At its best, it can be an almost sensuous kind of thing, like on a warm day,” Larson said. “Laying down the color sends a chill through yourself sometimes. Being like a big kid, to be able to blend the colors together. That’s the fun part, you know?”

Neighbors compliment his work and stop to watch. Kids especially love the colorful dragons. Once, when he was drawing in Dolores Park, a visitor spent 20 minutes walking circles around a mandala, mesmerized. A few times, onlookers have called the police, assuming he was graffitiing. But these interactions have always ended peacefully. “Good luck trying to prove damages in court. Like, it goes off with water,” he said. 

Larson was one of 29 people laid off by the SFMOMA earlier this month. He had worked in visitor experience, greeting visitors and selling tickets. It was a dream to get to work in art after years of driving gigs and catering jobs, he said, and he’s not sure where he’ll go next.

On his blog, Chalk Visions, Larson has catalogued his work since 2009, snapping hundreds of photos of his work on the sidewalk. He hopes to collect images of his favorite drawings, long washed away but immortalized in photos, into a book. 

“Sometimes people ask, ‘Don’t you wish it was permanent? Are you okay with it just washing away?’ I’m like, yeah, that’s just part of the nature of it. Kind of the Zen-like thing. But it is affirming to me, it gives me a boost, to go and look through the archives of it all, the vast number of things I’ve drawn,” he said. “It’s good to review it.”