Finishing Up: The Marietta Mural

 

I was very excited to paint my last creature in the tunnel, and to have that creature be a BIRD. It makes me smile to think of how I managed to work two birds and two mammals into an underwater mural that could reasonably be expected to consist entirely of fish and turtles, but hey. Biodiversity is the spice of life, and birds fly underwater, too!

I found some absolutely amazing photos online, taken by Alan Murphy in Texas. They are surpassingly beautiful, with crazy water swirls and bubbles and distortion. I would have loved to play more with those motifs, but I just didn't have time--we drew and painted the whole durn tunnel in four huge days, from the first projection to the final brushstroke (laid down, of course, by Perfectionist Me). 

But this photo was my inspiration.

Photo by Alan Murphy

I changed the head and gave it a tail...I'm not sure where the tail is on the reference photo. Lost in a swirl of bubbles! Throughout, I wanted to bring some action into the mural, and the sudden arrowing splash of a belted kingfisher seemed like the perfect vehicle.

Laying down base coats.

By end of day Thursday, August 12, I thought I was done with this bird. It looked pretty fly, I thought.

I asked Beth Nash to come over and give it some swirly bubbles, because I was too much of a perfectionist to just have fun with it. I was still fussing over feathers.

 

It's kind of a big deal for someone like me to turn over their painting to someone else and say, "Have at it!" but that was one of the big lessons of this project for me. More is better. Community is vital. There are much better painters out there than me. Like Beth Nash! Let go, give someone else a whack at it.

Here's organizer/visionary Bobby Rosenstock's Instapost about it. He's @justajar on IG.

We were elated that Thursday afternoon to have finished the tunnel in only four days. Liam and I just wandered around, taking photos and marveling that we had done it!

Liam says you have to rub the otter's belly for good luck. Which would be a bad idea if everybody did it.

One of the most frequently asked questions from the good people of Marietta who peeked in on us as we worked was, "How you gonna keep people from ruining it? Gonna put some kind of a coating on it?"

It was a fair question, and it was the first thing I wondered when I contemplated giving heart and time to such a big project. And I have to say, having nearly everyone who came by to look ask us the same question was disheartening. Especially after our first morning of drawing. After it was power-washed and spanking clean, Bobby and the Marietta Noon Rotary painted the tunnel an even aqua blue inside. And on the very first night the blue went on, the night before we all came in to start drawing on the walls, someone came through the tunnel with a brick, hurling it against the freshly painted walls, scarring and denting them. How's that for a kick-off on your first morning of mural painting ever? It made us sick, but we all gritted our teeth and pressed forward, hoping that the quality of our work would give even the brick-hurler pause before they destroyed it.

But just to be sure, there's VandlGuard on it. 

The mural survived the week between being painted and being protected, thank goodness! And during that week I looked at photos I'd taken of my work, thinking about what might still need to be done. Something about the kingfisher was buggin' me.  Finally it hit me: I'd forgotten to paint bars on its underwings, and upperwings, too! and it was too white! Aack!

So I went and got three jars of mural paint from Bobby (black, white, and background aqua); grabbed some brushes and supplies; and headed down there on a Friday afternoon to set things aright. Ahhh! All better. Now it looks right to me.

Finally, on this last painting, I had gotten the hang of working with acrylics on cement. I figured out how to thin the paint down and layer washes, sort of like I do in watercolor. I made a million little adjustments, tickled in all those intricate markings on the underwings and secondaries and tail, and brought a blue-gray wash down the near wing and over the flank. Yes, the eye looks weird. That's because when a kingfisher dives, it blinks back a translucent nictitating membrane over its eyes for protection. Sure, I could have made the eye shiny black, but it wouldn't have been right. I like the demonic look.

When I was finally done with the kingfisher, I did a little touch-up on the diving merganser.

Unless I pointed it out, you might not notice the person with upraised arms that I painted over, legacy of the old mural. 

And there's another one next to it. Looks like they were having trouble with the paint, and kept glopping it on. The result was some impasto people that made me think of the Pompeiian volcano, those haunting casts in the hot ash that caught people in their beds. You think about a lot of things while painting large birds.

You can see the Pompeiians, but barely. Most people won't even notice. It didn't bother me one bit. That was then, this is now.

Artist Bonie Bolen added a nice crayfish near my kingfisher. It was great to see her again--we knew each other years ago, since her legendary dad Cobbler John headed up the Blues, Jazz and Folk Music Society in Marietta. Those were the days!  And Leah Seaman painted those rocks in nothing flat. I definitely could not have done that. Follow her @artabella on Instagram. She just finished painting a Porto-Let and it is awesome!!

Though I wouldn't have wanted to paint the whole thing with the public walking right through, it was fine while I was finishing up the kingfisher. I got asked a ton of questions, but mostly people were just so happy to see the mural and tell me how much they liked it. That was Really Nice.

Watching people make a point of bringing their kids to see the mural was my favorite thing of all. Just knowing that it would be a destination for little kids warmed our hearts. And I got to paint with my kid. Nothing beats that.

His eel, my kingfisher, together forever. :) Or until the next flood, I suppose. That's OK. I'd paint it all over again in a heartbeat.

The Putnam Street Tunnel gone from a pedestrian and bicyclists' passage to a destination, and we are so proud to have made it fun and beautiful.

Thanks to Bobby Rosenstock for coming up with the idea, swinging the grant, and pushing it all through. And for bringing the music and Sara's baked goodies that kept us going. Whatta guy!!

Here, Bobby starts off by describing the art he made in school--always wanting to surround the viewer with art. I love this little impromptu video--it captures his unique way of looking at the world, his out-of the box thinking. And the fun of painting and dreaming together.

On Friday, September 3,  2021, there will be a little ceremony, a ribbon-cutting for the mural from 5-6 pm. Come on down and meet the artists, then enjoy Marietta's First Friday, strolling up and down our lovely downtown streets. 

I hope there will be huge puffy clouds like there were on this evening. The play of water light on the bridge's underside is breathtaking on such a day. 

Doesn't that bass tail just draw you in? That glimpse of color and life and something unusual!

Fish, Turtles and Mussels--Mural, Part 2

All around us, as Liam and I slogged away on our latte-brown otters, people were creating wonderful things in wonderful colors. Leah Seaman ( artabella_gallery on Instagram) had time to do a lovely bluegill and some fabulous rocks before she had to take off. 

Bobby added a plain pocketbook mussel with its fish lure extended, and put a bunch of other native Ohio River mussels in Leah's lovely gravel bed.

Leah Seaman is front left, that's JZ on right front. Peeping from behind Leah is Beth Nash. Hailey Bennett is back left, organizer Bobby Rosenstock second from left, back; Liam Thompson, then there's Jolene Powell (@jolenepowellart) back right, who did a lot of the background plants. We were so lucky to get this team!

Savannah King (meadow_monarch on Instagram) worked for a couple of days on the giant paddlefish in the photo above. 

Yes, they swim the Ohio! Here's Savannah, working away.

Beth Nash (bethnashart on Instagram) made these beautiful spotted gar. I just adore her loose painterly style, and her fearlessness.

Here's Beth's redhorse sucker, and her American eel, which Liam painted! He had so much fun with the Noodle, as he referred to it. 

Here's Beth's magnificent muskellunge! Hard to believe we were here for only four days, when so very much got done. Nobody fooled around--it was get down and deal with it!

Bobby Rosenstock's channel catfish has a cool vibe, like all his work--it's fun and a bit fanciful. Check him out at @justajar on Instagram. You'll get as hooked on him as I am, promise!

Bobby told a story that people are loving, of a largemouth bass eating a little perch, who has its eye on a worm...

Hailey Bennett ( @strategicallly on Instagram) made a gorgeous  smallmouth bass

and memorialized her lovely northern map turtle in the mural. She also painted gobs upon gobs of these freeform fishes that help weave and tie together the enormous composition.

Sarah Arnold (@clutchmov on Instagram) has done a magnificent job documenting our work on this mural. DO read her articles at this link.  Clutch MOV magazine   Her writing and her photography, and the images by photographer Michelle Waters are top-drawer.  

Here, Sarah comes in after work and sneaks in a spiny softshell turtle after everyone left Wednesday evening. What a sweet surprise it was to find it the next morning! Sarah does so much outreach to instill a sense of community pride in the Mid Ohio Valley. We are very grateful to have her support.

The scene in the tunnel, with worker bees laboring. Imagine good old-time music, happy fiddles and banjos, a dash of reggae...it was a happening!

It was so great to be immersed in this creative energy, to be painting with others. It's not something we ever get a chance to do, as art is such a solitary pursuit. I'd never done it at all. Now I'm hooked!

Pylons say: Artists at work! We had to block off the tunnel for four days, re-routing bikers and walkers, but almost everyone was friendly and very understanding about it. 

I'll give you a closer look at my "process" in the next posts. It all went well after the otters. :)

Here, Beth Nash and Liam talk about what painting together meant to them. I love the music in the background--Bobby Rosenstock attended to all the details to make this tunnel a happy art space. Including his graphic design professor wife Sara Alway-Rosenstock's incredible baked goods!! What a gift to us all!

                  

Painting a Mural: Anticipation and Agony

 I am so overwhelmed with the experience of painting my first mural that I need to write about it while the feeling of flying is so fresh. Not only was it my first, but it was Liam’s first, too. I won’t lie—we were both pretty rattled at the prospect of painting on such a large scale. And so, too, were veteran artist Beth Nash, who often creates large format works, and organizer Bobby Rosenstock, another prolific and versatile artist. But Bobby asked me to work with him, and I jumped at the chance. His concept was for us to paint underwater life of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. Though I longed to paint some fish, I realized that I’d better stick to my expertise, which is birds and, to a lesser extent, mammals, which would spice things up nicely, since most people don’t consider birds and mammals underwater when they picture underwater life.

Hailey Bennett, Beth Nash and Bobby Rosenstock talk over our plans. I was to be Artist #4. 
 

 Over the many months between when I was invited and when painting finally began on August 8, I must have visited that tunnel, which passes beneath the Putnam St. Bridge in Marietta, five times. I’d walk through it, looking at the existing mural executed years ago by Marietta College students. It was pretty basic, as you can see, and it had been overwritten with some raunchy graffiti. It was past time for things to change. I’d look at the angry red scrawls of graffiti over those earnest little paintings, then up at the mayfly carcasses and spider webs coating the ceiling, and wonder how in the world we were going to make this change. The tunnel was so BIG!! How in the world could only four artists manage to fill up this enormous tunnel with images? How long would it take? Weeks? Months? Could I afford the time it would take to paint for so long? Could I even do this?

Liam at work. Photo by Michelle Waters

 

I decided to bring in Liam as my assistant, and that was the best decision ever. We have always worked well together, but I’d never gotten the chance to collaborate on a painting with him. He’d had a summer of not much happening other than helping me cut brush and clean the endless miasma that was our four-car detached garage/dumping station; he also cleaned out the living room closet, and cleaned his closet and room. We cut a hell of a lot of brush, too. As the time drew closer to the project start, we got more and more excited. That first morning when we started transferring our drawings onto the walls, it really hit me how BIG these things were going to be. We used a special borrowed digital projector, which was able to magnify the images though only a short distance from the wall. The sunlight pouring in both ends of the tunnel easily overpowered its bulb. We could barely see the images, and the projector kept spontaneously reducing them, too. It was frustrating but fast work to sketch out the faint outlines of each creature and then move on to the next.

I help transfer Beth Nash's spotted gar, dimly projected on the wall. Large. Very large.

 Oh my. So little to go on, but at least we had the basic proportions. At that scale, it would have been impossible for me to draw any of these things and get their proportions right. I had had such fun sketching out mergansers, kingfishers and river otters over the last few weeks. Seeing the otters blown up to 8’ long, and the kingfisher and merganser bigger than me, was mind-blowing.

Here are some of the sketches I did in preparation. 

Drake common merganser. Didn't make the cut.

Common merganser, hen

Friendly otter.

Otter 3. Didn't make the cut. 

Belted kingfisher, nabbing a fish.

We got all the creatures transferred onto the wall that day, and we commenced painting by about 11 AM. The surface had been power-washed and beautifully painted and prepared by the Marietta Rotary Club, with Bobby’s help. I was a bit surprised by the bright aqua background color. I'd been expecting a sort of muddy gray green, but I grew to love it as the work went on and I let go of my preconceptions of total realism. This mural was clearly going to be more about fun and pizzaz than research grade accuracy.

The Chroma brand acrylic Mural Paint we used was absolutely amazing—smooth as heavy cream, odorless, water based, and it covered beautifully with one coat. I couldn’t believe how nicely it went on, and how quiet and smooth was the concrete surface. This was going to be easier than I thought, I thought. I thought... 

I set to work on an otter. My learning curve was very, very steep. First, I failed to understand that I had to let a coat dry completely before trying to paint over it, so at first I got some very blurry, amateurish results. Second, here I was painting opaquely, after an entire lifetime of painting with transparent watercolor washes. My old brain didn’t quite grasp what I should be doing, how to go about it. I had to paint backward from how I’m used to doing watercolors—starting with dark and putting light on top, instead of starting with light and building to dark. Third, my drawing had been flopped, so nothing about it felt familiar to me. Fourth, I had nothing to go on but the charcoal outline-no anatomical hints. I couldn't even see where to place the ears. Fifth, I was teetering on a ladder with my nose right on top of an 8' long otter and I couldn't tell what the hell I was even seeing or doing. I had to step backward and down off that ladder what felt like hundreds of times that day just to see what I had just done. Oh why couldn't I work standing or sitting like the other artists? Why did my otters have to be so durn huge and so durn high up?

With this perfect storm of factors, I went off the rails very quickly, and took the guardrail along with me. First I screwed up the foreleg, then I screwed up the otter’s shoulders. I failed to convey that the otter was twisting in space (a little thing I’d done that was fun to imagine in a small sketch but nearly impossible to re-imagine at 8’ long with nothing to go on). The sketch looked fine, fun even...

Twisty, problematic otter, author of my torment.

but what I had painted on that wall was something entirely else. I had no photo reference for it—it was just something I figured an otter could do in water, having a highly flexible spine and being weightless to boot. In painting it, I had gotten way too dark in color and couldn’t back up from there…it was a disaster. It looked like a cartoon to me, like Alvin and the Chipmunks. I couldn’t stand to have anyone see it, but there it was, a thousand times larger than life, right there in front of God and Marietta. One hind leg looked like a duck drumstick, and the shoulder was all bulgy and wrong, wrong, wrong...arrrrghh. I can't even bear to post this, but here it is, and it is awful. I wanted to curl into a ball.

 

I went to bed that night in great turmoil. I was failing this test in a huge, huge way. At 2:30 AM I woke up, my mind buzzing, asking myself how it all could have gone so very wrong. Usually when I wake in the wee hours, I make it a point not to turn on any lights or do anything but try to go back to sleep. This time I flipped on the light, trudged upstairs into the studio, pulled up my reference photos and my original sketches, compared them to this snapshot of the painting as I’d left it, and just got down and dealt with it. Ah HAH!! There it was—the massive left front leg that looked so messed up. Good grief!! I scribbled out a corrections guide for myself for the morning. There were 21 points to correct on it. Now we were getting somewhere! 

I scrutinized the photos I’d gathered of otters swimming underwater, and noted that they looked pale, almost silvery, thanks to the air trapped in their fur and the flattening effect of the water’s polarizing filter. That was that! I needed to completely paint over that monstrosity I’d committed. 4, 5 and 6 AM came and went. I tried to get a nap, but I was too wound up. OK. My day had started at 2:30 am, and I was going to paint until 5:30 pm—15 hours straight. So much for the carefree life of the happy artist! At 9 AM I marched into the tunnel and announced to no one in particular that I was starting over from scratch. We would just forget about Day 1’s work and start fresh. I mixed a pot of Otter Beige, grabbed a 3” flat brush, and swabbed that thing all over, obliterating everything that was wrong. Which was…everything. 

 

 With grim determination, I painted and painted, going over the same ground as yesterday. People filtered into the tunnel despite our having put up lots of yellow police tape and orange pylons asking them to keep out. They wanted to watch us work, and to talk, to us, too. Talk?? I’ve been working alone in my studio for more than 30 years and now I’m doing this super hard scary gigantic messy thing and I have to be nice and welcoming? I can’t engage in conversation while working. When I’m painting, I am deep in my right brain, and it takes an active left brain to answer questions. After my sleepless night, all I wanted was to be left alone to fix the disaster I’d created. 

The other artists understood perfectly, because we’ve all been there. They stayed clear of me as you would stay clear of, say, a spitting cobra or a snapping turtle. They knew I was out of my mind and would stay there until I was ok with what I’d committed on that beautiful aqua blue wall.

 

A photographer was coming at 1 pm. The heat was on. I fought off the constant distractions as best I could, set Liam to doing the base coat on Otter 2 and just grappled with that twisty chocolate cartoon chipmunk until I had it where I wanted it. It was Not Fun. 

But by the end of the second day, I had something I at least was not ashamed of, and Liam had made huge progress on Otter 2, which was the better drawing of the two anyway. He did all the grunt work, did a much better job on the many square feet of fur than I had, and all I had to do was waltz over at the very end and tweak the face, eyes, and paws and show him the scumbling effect I wanted to achieve on the tail, which I couldn't reach anyway.

 It was awesome. It was like having an extension of myself who could actually do these things right, without overworking them. And at 6'3", could also reach them!

Better. 

 

 After painting approximately 16’ worth of muddy otter brown, Liam and I were dying to get into a little color, something lighter and brighter. All around us, the other artists were painting wildly colorful fish. It was time to move on to something Other than Otters. 

I'd done the worst first. I was ready to have a little more fun now.