Shine Mural - and Philadelphia Mural Arts Program's tallest scaffolding to date!

 The mural was painted entirely inside the studio.  This is a section of the N row in progress.  You can see there are ten 5'x5' sheets tacked to the wall.

 A view of the scaffolding from across Lehigh Ave.

 Lucia is drawing level lines on the primed wall that form the grid that the 5' x 5' sheets are then pasted to.

 

The scaffolding sits from 1.5' to 2.5' away from the wall, so you have to do some crazy moves to prevent yourself from falling sometimes.  This is Erin.  She's looking a little awkward but she's probably something like 6 stories off the ground only wearing a hardhat.

 Looking down (see the three peoples tiny hands working on other levels of the scaffolding?)

 and looking up at the basket of the boom lift/the letter "S".

Below are other people's photos:

 

The view from the boom lift, which was used to reach parts of the wall that were higher than 8 stories

 

These two murals are a part of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program's Porch Light Initiative, which is a pretty neat program:

The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services (DBHIDS) introduce The Porch Light Initiative, a three-year initiative that situates art and human connection at the heart of recovery and healing in three North Philadelphia neighborhoods

Together with individuals receiving treatment for behavioral health challenges, we are building teams of behavioral health service providers, artists, and community residents to address trauma in our most underserved communities alongside the associated issues of drug addiction, mental illness, and other behavioral health issues.

Rise and Shine are two murals of the three murals (the third is the top image of the above image) of the North Philadelphia Beacon Project.:

Created as part of the three year Porch Light Initiative in collaboration with Sobriety Through Out-Patient (S.T.O.P.), the mural The North Philadelphia Beacon Project reflects the creativity and effort of hundreds of community members, S.T.O.P. staff and service recipients, volunteers, and artist James Burns.
The choice of the word RISE evolved from 5 years of work with the recovery community. At roughly 40’ high, on the north-facing wall, the word RISE is visible for miles. Inherent in the word is the idea of recovery. RISE is painted atop a color grid, which houses portraits of community members and participants in the program. Artwork created with the artist and community in weekly workshops is re-presented within the large letters in a collaborative collage form. This collage work also exists on the south-facing wall within the color grid, where the word SHINE is paited at over 80' tall.
Within the color grid lives collage from individual participants.  Inside the large letters are quotes and phrases from the projects' many contributors. The phrases are quotations, segments, and word collages that originated from the workshops and originally lived in participant and artist sketchbooks. Those phrases were later incorporated into the final design. All of the sketches became the support material that gives this large project its rigor, and creates substance that is far greater than the two simple words RISE and SHINE. This breathes new life into the phrase, and begs us all to stop and think about these words in a new way and in a new context.

Mural Arts - touching up and finishing RISE

When I got back from Poland I spent a week planning for a trip to Alaska, and then spent a week and a half in Alaska with my mom.  After that, I returned to the mural project I had left behind for the Poland project.  This mural is part of the North Philadelphia Beacon project and can be seen on N. Broad and Lehigh in North Philly.  It was designed by James Burns. It is approximately 250' x 100'.  It'sa big one.

 

This one is not my photo, but I am told it is the view from the hospital.

 

You can see some white gaps in the mural - those give away how the mural was put up - 5'x5' pieces of cloth were painted and then aligned to a grid drawn on the wall and then pasted on the wall. I was one of the people responsible for painting over those.  I also helped to seal the mural with an acrylic sealant.

 The view.

 We painted on this 30' swing stage that dangled from the top of the building.  The roof below us is on top of the fourth story of a building, and then we went an additional 5 stories higher than that on the swing stage.

 

Another view.

2013 Mural Arts Paid Summer Internship Program

I recently applied to the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program's Paid Summer Internship.  I had to write an essay (one of my least favorite things to do) for the application.  When I was doing research for this essay, I snooped around a lot on the Mural Arts website and Mural Farm.  Philly Painting was something that I was totally unaware of until I had to write this essay.  It totally blew me away.  I watched all of the short videos about the project that were posted and a really great Ted Talk about it. These two Dutch guys named Hass and Hahn got a grant to paint like four entire blocks of Germantown Ave. They are known for painting a hillside of favelas (slums) in Rio de Janeiro bright colors. I really like these guys - they do amazing work and don't think too hard.

The following weekend JB and I were driving somewhere and we made sure to go down Germantown Ave to get there just so we could see it in the flesh.  It's awesome! There's also a lot of weird sculptures and a crazy mosaic fence.  So anyways, I painted my application to look like one of the Philly Painting color swatches, in the hopes that that would increase my odds.  Man, I really love Philadelphia's murals, public art, big stuff, and painting large scale... I really hope I get this internship!

Another thing I saw on the Mural Arts website was the zoo mural that's in progress now.  I remember a couple of years ago when they were accepting submissions for that mural, and I couldn't do it because I was going to be in Poland when all of the important planning meetings would have been happening.  All I can say is, I wish I would've applied anyways!  I am unimpressed by the design of this mural.  I feel like everything looks disjointed with how the scale shifts so much.  I feel like the artist was successful in the shifting scale of the kangaroos, because it feels like one of them is in the foreground.  In defense of this design, it is on the side of a parking garage, so I feel like designing anything would be really difficult with those grey strips breaking everything up.

Philadelphia Mural Arts training program: done

Last week I had my last Muralist Training class with Dave McShane.  We had to pick an actual wall in Philadelphia and design a theoretical mural for it.  Typical themes for community murals are:  social problems (anti-drug, anti-domestic violence),  history, portraits of role models, education, health, religion, and sports.  I was personally intrigued by how many horse and carriage pairs there are.  I especially liked how in lots in the heart of the city there are horse stables.  It just surprised me.  There happen to be a stable near my boyfriend's work, so I chose an empty wall near there.  I wanted it to seem like the horses were pulling the wall/building.

 

Mural drawing, 10" x 13", pencil on bristol paper, 2012.

The next step was to make a 5 ft x 5ft painting of a blown-up section of the drawing.  I had this pretty much done in one week.  I think I do want to work on it a little more.  I definitely need to take new photos since the direct sunlight hitting the dark parts of the painting in this photo make it look sort of dull.   I'm going to mount this on plywood and frame it before the class' show in June.

Pull, 60" x 60", acrylic on this weird fabric used for murals that feels like dryer sheets, 2012.