Found Art: Downtown LA

Shakespeare?? Is it thou?

I went walking around downtown LA recently on a "food crawl" (delicious, by the way), and came across this intriguing piece of work on one of the buildings. Please forgive the image quality, I had to use my camera phone haha. In case you can't tell, those are birds coming out of the guy's arm and on his chest is a heart kind of combined with an engine.

As a typical introvert, I appreciated the introspective expression of the face and posture. Overall I think it's one of those "weird, in a good way" kind of paintings. It looks like Shakespeare to me, though obviously not an exact interpretation of the poet we're used to seeing throughout the years. I'm thinking it might be a portrait of the artist as Shakespeare + The Thinker? I don't know, I'm definitely taking wild guesses! But that's part of the fun when looking at some pieces - trying to pull some sort of meaning out of what you're seeing, be it your own or what the artist wants you to see. Either way, whoever did it is certainly a talented person and really had something to say. It wasn't necessarily part of our tour, but it made us all stop and talk about it at least for a few minutes. I thought it was worth sharing!

If anyone knows who did this, please let me know!!