“I missed out on Saturday morning cartoons as a kid because I had to go to Latvian school,” artist Ansis Puriņš of Boston’s Brighton neighborhood writes, “to learn the language and other cultural things like songs, dance, and jewelry making. I feel I’m still chasing glimpses of cartoons even though I can pull them up anytime now.”
So it generally makes sense that Purins’s comics, like his book “Super! Magic Forest,” can feel something like a Yogi Bear adventure—after Yippies spiked the town’s water supply with L.S.D. It looks all cute Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, but things get weird—with goofball elves—and shadowy wizards.
Ansis Puriņš and Blipblipbeep (Jennifer Purins, they’re married) have taken this style to Boston’s streets by painting an electrical box at 950 Commonwealth Ave., in front of the Sullivan Tire and across from Agganis Arena, in 2021, and another electrical box down the street at 1504 Comm Ave., at the corner of Summit Avenue, in 2023.
Last month, the duo celebrated their new mural “All This, All at Once”—dreaming up a neighborhood of funny cartoon cats and birds and fish and walking slices of pizza—on display outside the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston.
“The mural is made of bright fluorescent pigmented paints, designed to slowly fade,” Puriņš writes. “This possibly reflects me getting older, how memory fades and shines in unforeseen ways. I wanted the mural to reflect that we Allston-Brighton neighbors all are so different from each other and yet are all in this together, regardless of the lots given in life.”
Puriņš and Blipblipbeep are hosting “Sugar-Bright: Vintage Doodle & Draw” at the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston on July 29. Spots for the free cartooning workshop are all filled, but maybe you can sign up for the waiting-list in hopes that someone can’t make it.
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