Immural

Speaking of murals …

Once upon a time I thought it a good idea to offer my illustration services as an item for our kids' school auction. My work is mostly editorial illustration, but with a paucity of publishers and editors among school families, I suggested painting a mural.

I pictured bunnies and butterflies and sunshine for someone's child.

The winning child, or his family, wanted Spider-Man®™ and The Incredible Hulk™© instead.

Oh.

Into the deep end of trademark violation I dove. Again. Instead of asking permission, like last time, I'd ask forgiveness should the moment warrant.

This is the final sketch I used for reference. I decided to place our superheroes high above our city, on a sort of busman's holiday, maybe fighting political crime in the capital. The Hulk©® is after Spider-Man®©, or maybe they're both chasing/escaping the same thing, I don't know.

The Hulk is clinging to the curved glass front of 300 Capitol Mall. Sacramento's iconic Tower Bridge, now painted gold, rises just behind him, spanning the lazy green Sacramento River.

The building that houses a branch of Drexel University and shores up the south end of Old Sacramento is right behind Spidey, with the Capitol Mall rolling by it and Interstate 5 going crossways underneath. On the Yolo County side of the Sacramento River is the ziggurat-shaped building that now houses state offices.

All of this performed without a safety net or the cool tool known as Google Maps®©™. Thank you, you're too kind.

(Aside No. 1: Research took me to many different iterations of Spider-Man®™, who changed proportions and outfit design with each new artist. No other superhero seems so malleable. Sometimes Spider-Man™® looked like the prototypical space alien with  oversized head; sometimes he seemed boneless. I went with a more wiry version over the Everyman shape from the 1960s Spider-Man®© cartoons, and the tendrilous gnarly twhippy web stuff.)

To prepare, I made a cartoon in the original sense, a giant drawing to fit the wall, made of big sheets from the end rolls of newsprint taped together. I blocked out the figures on the sheet of paper, then scribbled hard with dark graphite over the lines from the other side. The idea was to tape the cartoon to the wall, trace over the lines and transfer the image to the wall's surface. Michelangelo and those Renaissance dudes had apprentices punch holes along the drawing, and dab at the holes with little bags full of chalk dust, thus tracing the drawing to the wet plaster of a fresco.

Alas, no apprentices, plaster or patience.

(Aside No. 2: What is the story with these superheroes, anyway? Literally, what is the story? On the outside looking in, superheroes seems to live parallel and concurrent adventures, rather than a single story arcing from one comic book to the next. So when I read in the news that a major character will die or transform in some real-world headline grabbing way, I think, so what? Superman seems to be dying, marrying, divorcing or coming out of the closet simultaneously.

(Maybe — just maybe — those news stories are just ways to get people to buy $4 comic books.)

Halftone dots suggesting full color.

My original plan was to build the mural's color with dots to mimic the halftone dots used in printing comics. I would even paint the mural in the four core printing inks, cyan (a middling blue), magenta, yellow and black. Into thin plastic cutting board sheets I cut holes in a grid pattern with a die punch — hundreds of holes. The bulk of my time went into punching those damned holes.

On site, all these preparations went out the kid's bedroom window. The cartoon proved difficult to affix to the wall, so I ended up eyeballing from the sketch to block in the characters and the background.

The halftone dots wouldn't work, either, not without a lot of time and a lot more experience. In printing, the dots are laid down in precise grids, and the dots at differing sizes to create the illusion of image and density of color.

I painted the characters in full color instead, outlining them in black — ironically, the solid color that comic book publishers wished they could do. I painted the background a bit lighter, leaving large expanses of the pale yellow pulpy-paper color of the walls, and painted dots to suggest halftone dots. It became a little Roy Lichtenstein.

(Aside No. 3: It's been a whole year since the last creation myth movie for Spider-Man®©™. When's the next one coming out? Tick tock!

The same for the Hulk™®. Think of the three dozen A-list actors denied the right to star as David/Bruce Banner. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, you're next, and hurry it up. Robert Redford ain't getting any younger.)

The project was at once fun and challenging and strange. Fun because it was drawing on a scale I rarely get; fine cramped gestures with a pencil became grand gestures of my arm, brush in hand, gliding paint along the wall. Challenging to handle all the logistics, preserving the perspective and life of the drawing at a large scale, keeping the carpet and furnishings clean, staying focused.

Strange because I was a fly on the wall, or rather bouncing about in angular patterns in a strange room in someone else's home.

Nothing weird, mind you. Just different. I was living each day to the cycles of other people's lives, hearing halves of ordinary phone conversations, trying to decipher noises. Did someone come into the house? Did someone leave? Is the house empty? What was that noise?

I don't know how tradespeople do it, working in others' homes. If I was smart I would have put on headphones and gotten lost in music. As it was, I became anxious for the school bell to ring and made sure to clean up early to get out of the family's house to retrieve my kids before they did.

Finally done, I got good reviews from the boy's mom.

Shortly after, she hired me to paint something for a daughter's room, something simpler: Silvery purple clouds drifting across the rose-colored ceiling, an unseen setting sun lighting their edges orange and pink. All gesture and scrubbing.

On the way up to the daughter's room the first day of painting, I passed the open door of the boy's room. The superhero mural was almost entirely obscured by stacks and stacks of bins for toys and odds and ends. Spidey looked like he was thwipping desperately to avoid the imminent suffocation by Legos™©. The Hulk® had already succumbed.

What none of us really worked out is that this mural wasn't a gallery piece but the periphery of a living, breathing, very active kid and all his stuff. Spider-Man™ and the Hulk©® proved no match.

Not my own

On the road less traveled by, I found this.

It's near the corner of Arden Way and Del Paso Boulevard in north Sacramento. I don't know what it means or how long it's been there.

I'm hoping you'd know.

Glossy yellow, highlighted on the
right edges of the letterforms with
light yellow matte paint, pushed
off the wall with matte blue paint.

You'll find it on the wall of a building emptied but for a jewelry and loan on the opposite side. I'm reasonably certain the art will still be there when you go looking.

In a perpendicular city in a perpendicular valley, Del Paso is unusual for crossing Arden Way at about a 30-degree angle. This wall is on one of the resulting acute angles, right in front of a triangle-shaped gravel lot where a gas station and convenience store used to be. Travelers north on Del Paso and east on Arden get a lingering sweep of the art.

In scarcity of gas and convenience on this corner, we can see it and wonder.

Google Maps'®™ latest spy view shows the lot had been barricaded by temporary fencing and the wall was bare except for the mottled and white patches you see beneath the lettering. How long between then and now is a mystery.

Rust primer was used to sharpen lines
and knock back the brick.

So is its meaning. Research so far yields nothing. I misquoted it to my friend Bob, an artist and designer, as "in Scarcity we Bare our teeth," quite a different sentiment — a threat, maybe; a warning. The changes much. Maybe it's still a threat or challenge, but it reads more like a statement:

This is what happens when we are diminished. (?) We bare the teeth in anger? In a cry? In a smile? In hunger? In want? In longing?

Whose teeth? The community's? Real teeth, or something else, the buildings of a spare street? Someone's rawness?

It's a poem in itself — someone's poem — sounding obtusely as if translated into English. Its message may belie its art.

Is it a shrine, a talisman? Is it graffiti or commissioned art? Yellow and blue are the colors of Grant Union High School, a couple of miles up the street, plus beveled edges of light yellow and occasionally the rust of automotive primer. Is it protected by Pacer pride?

It is unsigned, as far as I can tell, and passersby so far leave it alone. Was it painted freehand, or made using a cartoon like the Renaissance muralists, or projected onto the wall? The edges are sharp, as if masked. Though the tiniest big clunky in the long swooshes, the letterforms are even and tight, with the liveliness of slight variation.  That's difficult to do, even in the best circumstances.

Two blocks up the street I found another mural without credit, its art cool and monochrome, its words beautiful and without reference:

A THING OF BEAUTY SHINING IN HER EYES
She speaks to me about the mud dauber wasp, reciting all she had learned from Encyclopedia Brittanica 1970. The way it flies across the patio,/
 
Moving bits of earth larger than one would imagine. She watches it build a nest beneath the eaves, a thing of beauty, shining in her eyes.

Google Maps©®™ shows a bare wall where this image of delicate scroll, stolid yet dangerous, now shines.

I want to know what and why.

I'm a poor anthropologist for Del Paso Boulevard, a street I used to cross many times in past lives. Funny how one can mark the chunks of life by the roads traveled or avoided. I used to go through this intersection frequently many years ago, when I was helping teach English to a Hmong family that neither wanted it (the parents) nor needed it (the children).

Next, I drove here on the way to the elementary school where I was studying for my teaching credential at night.

(Now that I think of it, why did we spend our evenings at the school instead of the Sacramento State campus, where the credential was offered? We did nothing particularly teacher-y in those rooms; they were just meeting places, no different from Sac State classrooms except the desks were smaller. Maybe the teacher-teachers were just trying to get us used to the classroom environment. But the thing we most needed to realize — the sour playground sweat of children — had been wiped clean by custodians by then.)

I criss-crossed here when I was a substitute teacher, then a full-time teacher at a school a couple of miles north.

I was only traveling this route to run an errand, thinking it a shortcut from one part of my current life to another. It was long instead, and serendipitous.

Del Paso Boulevard was worn the first time I went through. Stopping once for an item in a drug store, I encountered someone in the parking lot who wanted to sell me crack.

The street hints of a vibrant, cosmopolitan past, its heyday brought by the war years, World War II and the Cold War, when Sacramento had two Air Force bases, an Army depot and a rocket engine builder going full swing. The street still holds touches of mid-century streamline architecture and Art Deco signage. It's a street George Lucas might have lionized as prime for cruising, when cars were king. But economic forces shifted and the street got forgotten.

Now new things dot the street, including a theater for young playwrights and an upscale restaurant and wine bar, and art galleries and artists' lofts, and revamped mid-century diners turned into new century eateries. Empty storefronts lodge between the new ventures. The city's weekly alternative newspaper, the Sacramento News & Review, moved there. The Del Paso Boulevard Partnership calls the place Old North Sacramento.

The street widens and narrows, providing herringbone parking spaces here and many many narrow crosswalks there, which cut in between medians planted full with shrubs and trees, and unexplained statuary every so often, and low walls filled with glass brick.

It has the feel of an absentee owner sweeping and primping without a sense for the place that it may have been.

And the mysterious murals: Commentary or more out-of-place tidying?

If you know, tell me.

Bad dad

Study for the mural for what was my study … for what never became a mural. Huh? Details below …
That's a scythemarked butterfly fish, in shape anyway. The colors are wrong. Gray whale in the back.

The first-born awoke hundreds of mornings and many dozens of naps to smiling, winking stars and a smiling crescent moon on the ceiling overhead, set in a carefully splotched sky of deep blue and periwinkle.

Across the room, he saw his abstracted self in red footie pajamas, brownish hair, back turned and androgynous (we didn't know if first-born would be boy or girl). The painted version was napping nestled in the thick roots of a tree lifting its leafy branches up the wall and across the ceiling, almost touching the night sky. The rest of the room was sunny yellow.

… the second-born got a beige room, hand-me-across furniture and plenty of good intentions, still tucked away in a green file folder in my cabinet.

Our daughter was to have floated in a forest of giant kelp, assembled vividly of species found off the coast. The long spike-edged, thick veined paddles of kelp would have swayed and folded and risen and reached to the ceiling. Everything would have been authentic.

Weaving tangled webs of seaweed, looking for style and color fits. Having fits.

Big fish would have woven about the kelp. Sheephead to glimmer like carbon fiber in faint light. Neon orange garibaldi, the state fish, to brighten the dark fronds, of course. Giant sea bass looking cratered as the moon.

For more color, I'd have dotted the forest with silvery Pacific spadefish and crimson popeye catalufa. Rockfish of many species, mottled red and brown, would have knocked the color back.

Across from the kelp forest, near a window suggesting the light of shallow water, would have blossomed a tidepool, creamsicle-colored starfish and anemones and urchins.

A school of Pacific mackerel would have passed in silhouette, dark against the darker distance, and more distant still, the pale shape of a gray whale descending.

I have page after page photocopied from guidebooks from the library, desired species circled, margins pocked with notes, environments planned, preliminary sketches in place — all long ago without the aid of the Internet. Appreciate my struggle.

The blackish blue of the deep would have lightened to blues and greens then almost white across the ceiling, which would have become the ocean's surface. A necklace of California pelicans would have skimmed above the surface, scattered and twisted and pulled apart by refraction and the folds of water. Their parts and pieces would have been lit from true east by the morning sun. Or maybe the sun would have dazzled like a disco ball through the water in one corner of the room. I couldn't decide.

Couldn't. Wouldn't.

Couldn't.

Here's the thing:

• Preparing for our first child was a months-long ritual, some invention, much convention. It was a vacuum into which we poured our energies — for all our children, no matter how many we'd have, not just the one. He/she would be the Everychild, the reason for us as parents, the source of our joy.
  
  It's not like we could have decided, OK, let's mete out this much energy, get this much done, then set aside some energy for the next, and then see what we have left in the tanks for succeeding children. It doesn't work that way. First one out gets all our marbles.
  
  When the first was born, the starter's gun went off and the race to Take Care of Everything had begun.
  
  With our daughter's birth, suddenly 1+1 became 6.72 and we were never getting anything done — let alone a mural — a new ritual that endured until their first years in college.
  
  Our son was lucky to get his mural while we were young and unwise. Poor succeeding children.

• I planned to give our daughter something radically different from our son's room, more realistic like a museum mural. In fact, I was inspired for this one by a mural Robert Reynolds had painted of the Morro Bay Estuary at the natural history museum there. An art professor at Cal Poly, Reynolds gave the actual bay outside a daring scare, matching it for light and beauty.
  
  Talk about a man's reach exceeding his grasp.
  
  The enormity of planning, let alone painting, would have shunted our daughter to who-knows-where in the house for months while I attempted this mural. Imagine the peaceful household.
  
  Would that my first thought was this mural, then the first-born might have gotten it instead, and this room would still be bare for the second.

• Maybe I wrestled with unreasonable resentment at the time, because the second bedroom had been my office until our daughter was born. It's a sunny square room, just snug enough to force me to have kept matters clean and efficient. My drawing table stood against one wall beside a window with northern light — where the tidepool would have been painted. The computer desk was a simple swivel of the chair behind me.
  
  Change meant moving my drawing table into a nook next to the washer and dryer, in a crooked room that could not have possibly passed building inspection when the previous owners built it. The computer went to a desk in the back corner of the dining room.
  
  It could just be I was dragging me feet.

• Maybe the mural would scare our daughter. The dark forest, the hulking fish becoming phantoms at night, the illusion of being under water.

And. And. And. The excuses are tucked away in their own folder, right next to the notes and sketches for our daughter's room.

By high school, in a different house, our daughter directed the painting of her bedroom, with the chief help of Nancy. The irony is that the result evoked the ocean. East and west walls were painted in dark aquamarine, north and south walls slightly lighter in tone, window and door trim in sea green, her desk and closet trim in reddish coral.

I was brought in — or maybe wormed my way in — to paint her door and closet doors in yellow over layers of red and brown. I had painted them to look distressed, patches of dark peeking out from the yellow, bright as the sunny houses of sunny tropical islands. I painted light and shadow to create faux carved patterns on the flat doors, then painted a large slanting rust-colored blurry-edged shadow over all the doors — they meet in a corner — as of a rococo wrought-iron veranda looming hidden above.

Our son got walls of cream and coffee, trimmed in brick red. One wall had wide stripes of glazed off-white, suggesting the awning of a bistro. He had just returned from a high school trip to France. I had no hand in the painting.

I still dream of floating a kelp forest pelicans skimming above, wingtips to the water.