Facing the Dragon

Probably the hardest part of any painting project is confronting the vacant surface where your work needs to appear. This is most scary when the space is large. The level of difficulty multiplies when measurements are spoken in feet rather than inches. Nowhere was this a bigger challenge for me than a wall in the Olive Garden restaurant project at 2 Times Square.

I was going through some old photos to scan into my computer portfolio the other night. I found a few I hadn't looked at in awhile and they brought back a flood of memories. I think the year was 1993 and as the mural painter for all new Olive Gardens since 1985, I was given the biggest project I had ever attempted. I was asked to design and execute a series of paintings ranging from 4 by 5 feet to a three story diagonal shaped monster mural seen from those three floors in partial views.

I flew to NY to look at the space in its raw form, with only the structural components in place. The street entry faces south at the north end of Times Square at 46th St. You entered a cafe at street level then funneled to an escalator that took you past an open mezzanine where a bar was being constructed. The ride ended when you stepped off at the main dining lobby on the third level. The wall to the right of the escalator was where the mural would be located - first floor to (gulp) third level ceiling. A couple of problems presented themselves. How do you paint above an escalator and how do you design a cohesive mural that will only be partially seen from different floors. There were 6 or 7 subordinate paintings to be completed, so remembering wisdom for me is a gradual gift, I left this big one with the greatest challenges, for last.

Working in Times Square is an entertaining pastime. Some days I would sit with the construction workers on 5 gallon plastic buckets at lunch and watch the world pass by. One day we watched a then lean Kirstie Allie limo surf, waving to the commoners on Broadway. As our thickly accented security guard who came from central Africa said, "People of many tribes." For sure.

When the day came to start the big painting, I placed a serrated pattern I had made on the wall. This was made of several smaller segments drawn back at my Orlando studio that were taped together and placed on the wall. Then I pounced a chalk bag over it to leave the drawing on the plaster.
A narrow escalator doesn’t lend itself to staging scaffolding or even standing up a ladder. The carpenters took pity on me and built a box that fit over the steps and that gave me a small platform to work from. About 8 days later the painting was finished.
The Times Square job was the most challenging and rewarding of all my mural assignments. The project took ten or eleven weeks total with s evenweeks on site. Being there was fun but it was like living on the Strip in Vegas. On weekends home, it felt good to sit outside in bare feet, and listen to the birds sing.

Hula Ville

Getting rid of old books is an job I never enjoy. I've read most of my collection of books. Most of those more than once, but there comes a point where shelf space runs out.

Encyclopedia of Civil Aircraft is hogging a big piece of shelf space, it's on probation along with Hubris. Once was enough for that one. Wolverines are Eating My Leg by Tim Cahill, that should stay for another read. One of the books that won't ever go to House of Hope is Legendary Poems of the Valley and Others We Tallied, 1987 Edition by Miles Mahan.

I mentioned my mural painting days for Olive Garden Restaurants in an earlier post. There were 15 years of travel and too many experiences to detail in a couple of blog postings. But here is a memory that sticks out as I scanned my bookshelf.

Miles Mahan was a poet and an artist. When I met him in 1990 he was 94. He lived alone in a trailer on 2 1/2 acres of joshua trees along Route 66/I-15 in California's high desert north of the San Bernardino Mountains . I had finished a mural job for Olive Garden in Victorville and was driving back to Los Angeles for a red eye flight to Orlando. On the right of I-15 was a strange looking collection of bottles hung on dowels, primitive hand written signs and a giant hula girl waving to traffic. A sign said, Welcome to Hula Ville.

I got out of the car and wandered into what looked like an entrance but was just a dirt path under the overhanging branches. There was scrap wood everwhere nailed to the Joshua trees and staked in the ground. Poems. I thought I might be intruding in someone's personal garden when Miles stepped out of the shade. He was dressed like my imagined vision of a desert rat. Scruffy beard, suspenders, I noticed he could use a shower. He told me he had lived there in that spot in the desert since 1955. He said every day he picked up the trash that people threw out their car windows, and soon he noticed bottles were an endless commodity. He decided to make sculptures to go with his poems painted on scrap wood. Travelers began to take notice and stop.

He had a notepad in his hand and said he was composing a poem to read for some folks later that day. He read me what he had.

On a mound bottles ya see,

bringing joy to all of thee.

Once they held a tasty wine,

now in th' sun empties shine."

"Who are you reading it for?"

"I'm going to be on the Johnny Carson show," he said. "They are sending a limo out a little later."

I wasn't sure how to reply to that. I sputtered something like "uh, that's great".

I sat on a metal chair outside the trailer facing Miles as he put together a few more verses and read them out loud.

You could tell he took joy from word play. We talked for awhile, him wanting to know about painting wall murals.

I could tell a bath was in order before the "limosine" arrived.

"I'll watch for you tonight," I said as I got up to leave.

Someone once said no man is happy without at least one delusion. OK, I thought, he seemed happy and otherwise normal. I wished him luck.

That evening at LAX I stopped at the newstand on the way to the gate. The LA Times TV section, Friday August 17, 11:30 pm: Nightline- Ted Koppel is anchor; Arsenio Hall - Steve Martin, Rick Moranis; The Tonight Show - Patrick Swayze, bottle collector Miles Mahan.

"Son of a ..."

I called home. Susan recorded it on the VCR. Miles wasn't talkin' trash.