We haven't made an appearance here for a while - sorry about that ... off doing other stuff. Which of course means I have a lot to catch up with. Well, we knew that. I had a lot to catch up with, anyway!

What I really want to get up here, though, is the Huntington Woods Mural Project, because that was such a big deal, happened a while ago yet is still current as they will have their big dedication this April. 2010.

So - it was back in the Olden Days when I worked for Decovis Interiors that we put in a bid for a Public Works type thing. It went into the pipeline, we forgot about it, then eventually here that oh my, we're still in the running. Oh good.  Then after another while we hear that we got it - cool!

Huntington Woods (referred to hereafter as "HW" so that I don't have to keep typing that out) has a Beautification Committee, and a big wall next to some drive-thru mailboxes. As part of their re-vamp of the whole mailbox area they were after some public art.

Here's the wall once things were all cleaned up and nice. 37' long.

And here's what happens on the other side: Larry repairs big machines.

Other people drive in & out and do things too - but since Larry posed for me & I only saw him fixing stuff?   ... I think it's his place.

But the whole HW idea was to put more of the W in the HW ... so their architect had done a rough of some parklike setting. We tossed around how-to options & changed our minds a couple of times. The pretty wall wasn't pretty yet, and yes it did take at least the estimated 2 years before it was. Was it more? Claire? Cheryl?

Claire Galed & Cheryl Riskin were the two organizers we talked with the most. Lots more people were involved, of course. It's the Larry Effect, again.

Claire (her office is in there behind the wall)

Cheryl

After various ideas being thrown in & out of the pot we had a design, knew what materials we wanted, and just had to wait for the go-ahead.

July 2007 saw us ordering 17 panels of Econolite (signwriter's board, 2 sides aluminum, corrugated plastic in the middle), a small boatload (OK, a box - but more than we'd ever ordered in one batch before) of Createx Autoair, and getting all our ducks in a row to meet at Janice's place in Galesburg, MI. Janice has a nice big barn, would let us stay, and who could ask for a more beautiful painting environment?

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Paula

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And Janice even had family that we could rope into working, too!

Rachel files the nasty burrs off so that no-one opens up their hands in the name of art. Garth hauled, they both sanded.

projecting

spraying basic layout and base colors

Bringing previous ones back in to check line-up, then its out to the art production line.

Jean Weir, Paul Nehring, Kitty Rockafield,

Jean  

Back to look at the whole thing

Jean is a wonder with landscape and botanicals!

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Kitty   Paul

Kitty, our tool maestra ... she also built us our outside-easels. She paints, too, but stubbornly wouldn't this time. Just a social call with some tool use - I love my friends!

Paul is normally a sculpture guy, but he really got into some serious trunkage with all our foreground trees.

Christina, who was a student at Western Michigan University, at the time. And made it into the paper very photogenically with those panels. I think she was stuck in the Land of Leaves at that time, not sure.

See - we had all these panels, and they all had to line up the right way. And they're big. And the whole composition is bigger. So we had 4 different areas - 2 for 3 panels at a time side-by-side, and two for up-and-down alignment, and we kept switching everything around between workstations.

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And the chickens were hilarious.

Every now and again one or two of them would escape. You'd come back from lunch to find one perched on your painting.

Notice the trampoline. Artist's resort, eh?

Eventually we did have to stop painting. When you can't really see what you're doing anymore that is usually a good signal it's time to stop.

But it's just so much fun, see? But after quite a few long days we proudly put all the panels together and figured it was ready to go.

Debby, Christina, Jesse, Janice, Paula, Paul.

So we were just left with the clear-coating, clean-up, and packaging the panels up sensibly for pickup by the HW truck.

So now seems like a good time for a break. More on the saga tomorrow!