Mural Projects and Space Transformations.
Circus Wheels : Atlas Street Garden
Atlas Street Garden in Harrisburg with Happy Veggies and "Circus Wheels" a mural by Meisa Chase. Photo courtesy of Ellen Crist
Harrisburg, PA. Atlas Street Garden Mural. 2015
A "call to artists" post made me aware that a mural opportunity at the Atlas Street Garden. I've not yet had too many opportunities to work outside on a mural so I was very excited to see what that might entail. I researched my painting materials, and noting this was outside in a spot, I choose to go with a water based enamel over an oil. This would both simplify my clean up and shorten my dry time. It was my lucky day at Sherwin Williams as they were having a fantastic sale on the paints I had planned to get the day I was there. Since this mural was to be Per Gratis, I was grateful for the unplanned discount. I opted for a simplified color scheme to both emphasize the illustration quality of my work as well as to keep investment costs reasonable. First the background went on with a little help from my friend Victoria. I choose a bold zig-zag pattern for the mural. Bringing something whimsical and friendly to the garden space and neighborhood was important. I researched the history of real life circus and trained animals performing on wheeled contraptions as my inspiration. The under sketch is hand painted on to the mural wall off hand drawn sketches. I tend to not use a grid system opting instead to work directly using my own eyes and perception skills to scale things to the space. My murals are hand painted. I typically do not use stencils, grids, spray paint or other tools to create my images. The finished work became an animal parade (titled: Circus Wheels) with circus animals bike riding and skating. Since the mural is in close proximity to Recycle Bicycle, I felt this was a friendly nod to that neighborhood group as well. I got the back story on The Atlas Street Garden mural space the day I completed it. I was informed it had acquired a hilarious and inappropriate image which had prompted the search for someone to take the mural space on, and a re-priming of the board. It had gone unused since its original installation and until that event happened. It was my pleasure to bring this artwork to the garden and the community. May there be many more outdoor murals waiting for my touch, and as always, Please Enjoy.
Equus Vivid Glitter Herd : Wall Mural at the MakeSpace
Harrisburg, PA. Gallery Wall Mural. 2015.
The Bony Pony Mural: Room in the Historic Riding Acedemy
Chicago, IL. Defaced Wall to Finished Mural. 2014
Summer 2014 I was in Chicago working as a carriage driver. The room I transformed was inside of a Historic Riding Academy that was over 130 years old and had been markedly defaced with spray paint. What had been painted in this room was awful and it had to go. I used a base coat of kills primer to neutralize the oil based spray paint and marker. Then I plotted a dynamic background scheme that would "blend in" to the unique space of the room without having to paint the entire thing. I had limited resources to create the work so I sourced "oops" latex based paints from the local hardware store. I sketched out a draft pony, and decided to leave him somewhere between alive and skeletal, which felt fitting for the place. The historic Riding Academy that now was housing Carriage Horses the provide Chicago tours was itself somewhere between a ghost and real. One of the last strongholds of living equine history, a relic of the old city, the mural reflects upon the place of the horse in modernity and the people who work hard to preserve this tradition. The finished work was titled "The bony pony".
Details from start to finish from defaced wall to finished mural.
Refurbished Studio in the MakeSpace
Artist Meisa Chase working on the Carriage Horse Mural in her studio at the MakeSpace with friend and artist Victoria Brobst.
Harrisbug, PA. A room in the MakeSpace (above) previously used as "communal mural" (below) transformed into the artist's studio/ gallery and updated with a carriage horse mural. View the horse mural in the bottom gallery. 2013-2015.
Defaced wall to re-finished gallery space. Rehabbing this small room was a challenge. The idea of a communal mural was nice, but in actuality it was a train wreck. I mean no disrespect to the community, but what was left on the wall in this room was akin to a middle school locker room gone terribly wrong. Cheeky inspirational sayings, names, eyeballs, doodles etc were scrawled in a variety of media including marker and milk paint. Both proved to be very problematic in the clean up. Marker, being alcohol based, tends to rise to the surface when painted over. This means that you can paint over it numerous times, and it continues to show through. The milk paint that had been used was mixed from pigments added to milk. Inexperienced persons had mixed the pigment load to be so dense that the wall would be stained a different color as you were putting the base coat on. The milk paint pigments proved to be very hard to neutralize. This tiny room (10 x 8) required 2 gallon cans of kills as a base coat. I had to upgrade from the standard kills to the heavy duty version on the second go round as the room was proving so difficult to bring back to white. The lesson here for me was community murals are best left to boards and surfaces that are not attached to a house or a building. While painting on a wall is fun, using the incorrect materials to do so creates a lot of work and headache for someone else (in this case me) to clean up.
The Carriage Horse Mural: Studio at the MakeSpace
Harrisburg, PA. Defaced Studio Wall to Finished Mural. 2014
Inspired by the artist's personal favorite driving horse, Calamity Jane. A carriage horse in Chicago, IL owned and raised by Debbie Hay of Antique Coach & Carriage.
The Chopping Block:
Mural concepts that did not make the cut (but I still love!)
Sometimes getting that mural job is tough...
As an artist you don't always know (often rarely know) what people asking you to submit work actually want. You have an idea, you research it, you illustrate it, pay entrance fees, go through all the hoops and take a bunch of your time to do so, and then you get let down. Rarely will anyone give you an actual reason as to why you didn't make the cut. Often you wish they did as not knowing why is so much more torturous than a few words of dismissal, at least that is something!! Usually you were barely going to get paid or re-reimbursed to do the project anyhow, and all you get is a nagging and sad realization your work wasn't "good enough" for some blasted reason. Its one of those let downs that routinely happen to artists. So here they are, my sadly rejected ideas. I'm still fond of them even if they fell short in the running.
The Velveteen Rabbit in the Nursery
This illustration was researched for historic accuracy to the Victorian era and rendered in the artists hand. The color palette and sizing that would be used remains open to the setting it would be placed in. I never received a response from the Gallery who presented the open call for this proposal. I would love to have another opportunity to put this up in a Children's area.
Except from The Velveteen Rabbit:
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
Dia de los Muertos Gatos
This mural was intended for a cat shelter in Reading, PA. They had requested a basic idea, as the wall space available was unusual. They so disliked this idea that it was not even include in the public vote. I thought it quite hurtful that I got snubbed in this way as it should have been left to the public to decide if the work was venue appropriate or not. The proposal simply would have been voted out if people didn't like or understand it, so there was no need for the center to censor my work. The Latin culture embraces the spirits of both the living and the dead when celebrating "Dia de los Muertos" it is not not typically viewed as "scary" or "deathy". On Wikipedia the festival is described in this quote: "Autumnal rites are among the oldest celebrated on earth. It appears that in every country the Day of the Dead occurs at the year's end, after the last harvests, when the barren earth is though to give passage to the souls lying beneath it."[8] Yourcenar (1992), p. 136. I had imagined these cats to be a playful way to celebrate the center, as if all these cat spirits were there watching and tending to those waiting for a new home. I suppose the people at the center only saw my images as death obsessed. It still hurt to be totally cut out of the voting process, as if I had created something wickedly offensive. I do feel the center should have refused my entry and entry fee if they had no plan to show my work publicly. Thank goodness my entry fee went to help animals, at least I hope it did!
Personal Reflections
Perhaps we have made a grievous error in our modern aesthetic of blank walls and ashen hued spaces. From our color devoid city buildings, to lukewarm cookie cutter homes, the blank expressway walls and bridges, endless expanses of modern structures all decked out in middle grey so much color has been sucked out of our lives. Color has played a vial role through time and in many of the great cultures of antiquity. They painted, colored and surrounded their worlds in vibrant tones. I have often pondered how we have failed in this embracing of color in our modern times? There are artists ready and waiting to be employed, who are thirsty to fill our blank spaces, so much so they fill these spaces in secret and with money from their own pockets. Some might call it graffiti, that is almost a dirty word, but its not all vandalism as some is true art. I ask that instead of taxpayer money funding programs with the sole purpose of returning any space with "unauthorized" splashes of color on them back into a stale empty wall, why not use some of these spaces to celebrate life, culture and humanity? We are fighting a battle against our human nature, and loosing. No matter how many times we put the wall back to neutral, someone comes along and paints it, because to paint something on the wall it IS our nature! If we put to rest this modern cultural obsessed with blank walls, opting to employ our artist to paint and enliven these spaces we would be giving jobs to the brilliant minds of our times and unleashing healthy creativity in these expansive spaces we occupy. Although murals are a good choice, not everything would need to be a mural. Building advertisements were once common. Decorative painting would brighten dull corners, mosaic and other methods could fill the voids and the world could become a mirror to our souls instead of a somber tombstone. Imagine if sponsor and subsidy programs could offer building owners murals at reduced cost or even as tax write offs! Its time to rethink what we have allowed to be the norm, as it seems to defy every bit of our true human bei. Lets bring the colors and artists back into our world, our streets, our community and our hearts.