City’s mural project: big paintings, bigger ideas
8:37 PM, Oct. 7, 2011
Written by
Carol Motsinger
For the last year and a half, Asheville’s newest public mural was fully fleshed out with paint. But no one, other than maybe dust bunnies, could see it.
Asheville Mural Project director Ian Wilkinson actually stored the massive depiction of two Pritchard Park chess players going head to head carefully rolled up in sections under his couch.
A few weeks ago, he and mural co-creator Molly Must began to install it on Merrimon Avenue under Interstate 240 as part of the Lexington Gateway Mural.
They painted the striking piece on a nonwoven fiber that was then sealed to the concrete surface under the bridge with an acrylic medium. If you stare very closely, you can see slight seams between the golden knights and pawns, subtly connecting the rich jewel green squares of the board.
It’s the approach used by most modern muralists, Wilkinson said, because it avoids the much costlier approach of painting directly on surfaces using scaffolding.
A bonus: Must and Wilkinson could stick out their tongues at those pesky outdoor elements this way. They worked on the mural through all seasons, all weather events, because they were able to paint indoors.
This new, smarter installation process is just one demonstration of how the Asheville Mural Project, a program of the nonprofit Arts 2 People, is maturing nicely. “In the last year, we’ve crossed a lot of things off the list,” a paint-speckled Wilkinson told me Tuesday afternoon, after taking a break from touching up some chess pieces that I swear are taller than me.
This mural is so gigantic that it creates an encompassing new world in the shadows of the bridge bustling overhead.
The only things bigger than Wilkinson’s mural work, which also includes an impressive trompe l’oiel (French for “deceive the eye”) piece at the Cotton Mill Studios, are his ideas.
The selection of the chess players for the mural section is a symbolic summary of the mural group’s local focus. Other sections of the Lexington Gateway Mural include a timeline of the city, from its Cherokee heritage to the Industrial Age, as well as artists playing music and creating art.
Full story here.
Amazing.