The last post of this blog showed the beginnings of a mural on the neighborhood water treatment plant doors. I put some blue in the sky and knew there was only one direction – forward.
It is time to figure out where all the other pieces and parts belong.
This is the mural at the end of Day One. On Tuesday, I’ll show you the next steps of the process to create a Christmas present for my neighborhood.
For about 12 years, I was on our neighborhood water board. Volunteers are how things work when you live in a rural unincorporated town. I got on the board as the recording secretary because I can type fast and spell, but ended up helping to make decisions about things that I knew almost nothing about, standing in the middle of the street watching water leak away and having no idea what to do about it, taking phone calls from people who were mad about their water bills or wondered why there was no water AGAIN, reading water meters, attending way too many meetings, driving around the neighborhood knocking on doors to hand out Boil Water Notices, calculating distances between wells and the road, measuring tanks and figuring out the volume of water, helping to tear down the old treatment plant, writing articles for the newsletter that no one read, putting locks on the meters of people who wouldn’t pay their water bill, removing the locks when they decided to pay.
It was hard. I learned a lot and made friends with the other board members, 2 benefits from the experience.
Two years ago I resigned. Meanwhile, I would walk past the treatment plant and think about how nice it would be to have a mural on the doors.
Now that I have recovered from being water boarded, I want to give the gift of a mural to the current water board members and the entire neighborhood.
It took two years to decide what to paint. I used a card I drew back in 2001 of a made-up river scene, complete with Alta Peak and Moro Rock. This meant guessing the colors, and stretching things a bit.
To Be continued. . .
Put down your brushes and walk away from the mural! That’s what I had to tell myself at the end of Day Three on the mural at St. Anthony’s Retreat in Three Rivers.
At the end of Day Two, I took a photo of the mural, studied it, and made a list of things that were not quite right. When I arrived on Day Three, I didn’t even read the list but just started working. The oak tree, the sycamores, the river’s edge. . . fixey, fixey, fixey.
Next, I peeled the masking tape from the top 2 sections to see how effectively it masked the edges. Then it was time for lunch. (I love working at St. Anthony’s!)
The tape had a few malfunctions. The pencil we used to swing the arc and the blue chalk line all had to be painted out, so I used the wall paint to cover the now extraneous guidelines.
I signed it, then added one more poppy.
Stick a fork in it; it’s done!
I started Day Two on the mural at St. Anthony’s Retreat in Three Rivers with the idea that I could finish it, maybe even in the morning.
Fall down laughing.
First, I needed to fix the slopes below Comb Rocks. It was mushy in the mural, undefined, hard to read. See?
I looked out the window to see how the hills actually look. Of course, it is the wrong time of year, the wrong lighting, and the wrong angle; that’s where I try to blend artistic license with believability.
Artistic license is also why I have made Comb Rocks more prominent in the mural than they are out the window.
That took longer than I expected, so I took a break. First, I photographed the live oak out the nearest window, thinking it might be helpful.
Go back to work, Central California artist, because you are procrastinating and it isn’t advancing the mural.
Time for lunch! I love working here. 😎
The oak tree on the left, the bank along the river, the sycamores, and the river itself don’t seem quite right to me. So, tomorrow I will see how to make these things look more believable.
It is possible that painting inside a little chapel at St. Anthony’s Retreat is the most pleasant mural painting experience I’ve ever had.
This is a scene cobbled together from several photos of Three Rivers as it shines in the spring. Look at how much I got done in one focused day of painting!
When I paint murals, there is a lot of noise in my head. Listening to Shannon’s books occupied the part of my brain that keeps yammering at me that I have no idea what I am doing, and that this is too hard for me. So, on this day of painting, the noisy and negative part of my inner dialogue didn’t have a chance. I just listened and painted, and it was lovely.
St. Anthony’s Retreat is a conference grounds here in Three Rivers, a gathering place by many people for many reasons, not just a place for Catholic retreats. I like to go there; it’s close to home, has happy memories, and most of the people who work there are my friends (I don’t know all of them. Yet.) Plus, if I am there around lunchtime, they feed me really good food.
They want to convert a small windowless room to a prayer chapel, and got the idea to have me paint a mural on one of the walls so that it doesn’t feel claustrophobic in that space.
The wall is about 14 feet long and 10-1/2 feet high.
Stay tuned. I’ll show you the mural as it grows.
Truthfully, this mural is not in a highly visible place, it is rarely noticed, and no one cares if I refresh it or not. I don’t think anyone will notice if I leave the dreaded door. So, maybe I am finished. I didn’t sign it this time, so maybe I am not proud of it. Sigh. Maybe I am not finished after all.
We have had weird unusually cool weather here in Three Rivers, and I took the opportunity to continue working on the faded poppy mural.
A list of what remains to be done, depending on the weather and my availability:
I think that the distant Alta Peak and Moro Rock, along with the rocks on the hillsides can be left. Their fading makes them look farther away than they did when I first painted the mural, which is the way it is supposed to look.
The first public mural I painted was in 2008 on a Seatrain storage container at my church. 2008 was a “super bloom” year of poppies, and we were in love with those flowers.
Eleven years have passed, and most of the yellows have disappeared from the mural. Yellow+blue=green, so the greens are blue. Yellow+red=orange, and the orange is now pinkish. Any yellow in brown is gone, leaving lavender or gray. The results are rather dull. It isn’t in a high visibility area, and because the darks and lights (“values”) remain, it looks okay (from the back of a fast horse.)
But in my opinion, it either needs to be refreshed or painted out completely.
It was harder than I expected. I had forgotten how quickly acrylic dries on the palette, on the surface and in the brushes, how difficult it is to control the edges and the blending with that mural paint. So, I abandoned the left side and went for broader areas in the background.
I enjoyed listening to the river in the morning, and I was thankful for the cloud cover. But after 6 hours of painting, I decided that was enough for a day. Maybe if there hadn’t been a weed-eater going in the background, I would have lasted longer.
This project is going to take much longer than I expected. I might just ignore the door and leave out the tree.
More will be revealed in the fullness of time.
I had a little encouragement and companionship while working on the regreening of the Mineral King mural. It wasn’t the normal type, with questions and requests for business cards.
One of the most difficult parts of painting a mural for me is that the brushes don’t hold their shape. They get clogged up by paint, the ends splay out, and it is just impossible to draw with them or make edges look clean or accurate or anything at all like I want.
Sigh. Best viewed from the back of a fast horse. . .