It’s safe to say that everyone who frequents the cafes and produce markets on Irving Street has walked over or sidestepped the chalk art of Khalid Zakzouk, a Sunset District artist who works a part-time job at Lucca’s Deli.
His latest: A mama cow and baby pig in front of the Southern barbecue joint Smokin D’s, and a donut character leading to Uncle Benny’s Donut and Bagel, reading, “Donut worry, be happy.”
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Zakzouk, 58, spent two hours kneeling in front of the Sunset Pipeline dispensary near 23rd Avenue, drawing an E.T. rolling a joint.
He started with a light sketch and added layers of solid lines, blending and smudging the color with foam brushes.
In case of a mistake, he also brought a toilet paper roll. But in practice, he just gave the ground a strong blow, and the top layer of color flew away like sand in a desert.
The Palestinian artist started making art during COVID-19 lockdowns and tried mediums from oil to watercolor to colored pencil. But they all bored him. In 2023, he grabbed chalk from his wife Jessica Leaper, a teacher in Marin County, and began drawing outside his home.
His first drawings were geometric patterns. As he understood more about shapes and perspective, he branched out to figures.
“I went outside and I never came back in,” he said. “The medium is so forgiving, and you don’t have to be perfect, but you can make beautiful things.”
For bigger drawings, he spends four to five hours on the streets, facing the ground on all fours and pushing the chalk into the ground. It’s exhausting.
“You work your glutes, you work your legs and your back,” he said. “If you’re a person that doesn’t do yoga, I do not recommend it at all.”
Every piece lasts for about two weeks before Zakzouk hoses it down to make room for something new. In the winter, Zakzouk takes a break, gathering inspiration and doing research for future drawings, like how many fingers E.T has. And he waits.
As summer comes around and the days get longer, he gets enough daylight to do bigger pieces after getting off work around 5 p.m.
Even the fog on the summer evenings works in his favor. When it gets so dense that it starts dribbling, Zakzouk said, it diffuses the chalk and the water makes it embed even further into the ground. The next day, the drawing looks amazing.
“But it has to be just enough moisture, not a lot of rain,” he said.
Zakzouk’s favorite drawing, one that he remakes over and over again, is a Pac-Man maze on Judah Street at 20th Avenue.
In the morning, from his apartment windows, Zakzouk can hear kids obsessed with the maze and frustrated parents threatening, “If you don’t finish, I swear to God, I’m just going to cross the street and leave you here.”
“Kids do it. Old people do it. Drunk people do it. People on dates do it,” he said. “This is the piece that I love doing the most.”
In the past, Zakzouk’s work often carried a political message: The Statue of Liberty being manhandled by police, or a hand holding a grenade that reads, “free the land.”
These are not always well received, Zakzouk said.
An image of fallopian tubes giving middle fingers, after the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, only lasted an hour before someone washed it off the sidewalk. Someone else wrote an angry letter to Lucca’s Deli, saying they wanted to just come in and buy some cold cuts without “having political views rubbed in their face.”
When the onslaught in Gaza started, Zakzouk spoke out through his art. As months went by, he burnt out, and felt disappointed.
“I wanted people to stop and think a little bit. But I was asking people who are so accustomed to their comfort zone to feel for others,” the Palestinian artist said. “We have a saying in the Middle East: ‘Those who have hands in the water are different from those who have hands in the frying pan.’”
The current message is, as the disco song puts it, love. “I’m trying to remind people that culture and art and beauty belong to everyone,” he said. “It’s a form of relief, a sigh, ‘Okay, there’s something left in this world that I can enjoy.’”
The Sunset loves you Khalid!! 💕💕 Thank you!! Free Palestine!