Mural Musing #1

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“So, have you started drawing on the wall yet?” he asked. The very idea was absurd, and just a bit frightening.  To understand why, you must return with me to begin at the beginning .  .  .  .

When you look around inside our home, you see more art than wall, shelf or table top.  Art is interesting; blank surfaces are not.  Although we have never really discussed the idea, it is obvious that we share the notion that one’s home should be a visual adventure – well, maybe not an adventure.  In his memoir, The Education of a Wandering Man, Louis L'Amour asserts that "adventure" is simply a romantic word for troubles in the past.  Trouble becomes an adventure only when it is over and one is safely home again.  So, let us say, rather, that we believe one’s home should be a visual feast – a morsel here, a main course there, dessert across the room; but never the dull expanse of an empty plate.  We like living in space that engages the roaming eye, where an unexpected dialogue begins with every glance.

Murals and frescoes are the natural extensions of that inclination - wrap around art, if you will.   I have twice completely covered the walls of small rooms with murals.  Delightful experience.  Varied outcomes.   Additionally, we like trompe l’oeil.  I mean it falls naturally within the oeuvre . Why not have a wall that is a painting that “tricks the eye” into thinking that it is neither wall nor painting?  Besides, our front door opens right onto a small entry foyer that steps up into the living room past two doors – a powder room and a closet.  It has always felt a touch cramped. So nibbling in the back of our head has always been the thought, “What better place than the foyer to make walls disappear into a painting of somewhere else?”  The images below are of the "pre-mural" foyer.  Work has, however, already begun, as can be seen by the little star stickers on the walls.  Their purpose will become obvious over time :-)

There were, however, a couple of major considerations.  First, done well, trompe l’oeil is very cool – almost transformational.  Done poorly, it looks as if a nine-year old Jackson Pollack has been turned loose with magic markers and way too much chocolate. And when you actually paint something on the wall – well, it’s not like you can move it into another room. There it is.  The two murals I have done were in playful spaces, and even there were short-lived.  This is the first –

It was done five or six years ago in the powder room of an art gallery, in which I was a partner.  The gallery was a neat idea, but never actually opened.  I haven’t gone by to see what became of the space.  I sincerely doubt the mural remains.  Here is the second –

This was done in one of the bathrooms in the loft where Christine and I lived for a short while just after we were married.  The whole loft experience we attribute to aliens beaming strange messages into our brains.  We were able to unload it shortly before the recent funky mortgage induced financial meltdown.  Strangely, the buyers requested I return the bathroom to basic, boring, white.

Our current residence is more formal - definitely not funky.  A mural in this environment needs to be done by a “real artist” in a fine arts, primarily representational, style.  It is far beyond my playful attempts.  Unfortunately, a 10 x 10 foot mural by a real artist would cost about a year’s salary.  So our trompe l’oeil foyer remained a recurring daydream – until recently.

You see, among our dearest friends are Paul and Kiki Minnis, and Paul is one of them there "real artists."  I mean this is an incredibly talented guy whose paintings hang in museums, galleries and private collections throughout the country.  His pots are similarly honored, and he has recently taken to building classical guitars – in his spare time, when he isn’t providing the music with his accordion, which he plays in restaurants and dance halls around town – he once played his beloved squeezebox in white tie and tails with the North Carolina Symphony orchestra.  So far as I can tell, the only indication that he is 15 years my senior lies in the fact that one night when we were all sitting around after dinner, drinking wine and telling lies, I mentioned the mural concept and he said, “That’s interesting.”  Talk about your senior moment of epic proportions!

Paul has painted murals before – the 200-foot long "sky mural" in the American Airlines terminal here in Raleigh is his work.  But for some reason, the idea of our little mural, running up the stairs and across two doors appealed to him.  The idea festered for a few months, in his mind and ours.  We finally decided to ask Paul to recommend one of his students who might be willing to talk with us about our project.  We assume that the aliens were beaming messages into his brain that night because he said, “You know, we could do this together.”

Several more dinners and a lot more wine later, we agreed to enter into this project.  We would provide the materials, food, praise and solace; he would provide the artistic talent, and I would become his apprentice/slave/gofer, etc., etc.

Not long after that night, we were over at Paul and Kiki’s for dinner [yes, we do spend a lot of time eating dinner together] and he asked us to step out into his studio to take a look at some “concept sketches.”  We were thrilled, and eventually the maestro settled on the image below as the one he wanted to paint:

It is the creation of that mural that I will chronicle in the Mural Musings portion of The Wall.  I hope you enjoy the journey.  All of which, of course, takes us back to the beginning.  .  .  .

It was a couple of weeks after Paul had given me the “concept drawing,” and I had stopped by their house, which is close to campus, to share a small Codder and wait for the traffic to clear.  We gathered around the table in the kitchen, shamelessly feeding the dog people food and quietly sipping our beverages when he said, “So, have you started drawing on the wall yet?”  It was what I believe football coaches refer to as a “gut check” moment.  We’ll see how it goes .  .  .  .
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