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.

Mural Arts

I've started and finished my internship with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program all before the internship officially starts - July 1st! This is due to me thinking I was going to be in Poland for the first two weeks of the internship, but then Poland was cancelled, and then rescheduled, so now I would be missing the last two weeks of the internship.  The mural I'm working on was designed by James Burns, and is unofficially titled "Rise and Shine".  It will be going up on the corner of N Broad St and Lehigh Ave.  There will be two murals, one that says "Rise" and one that says "Shine", with Rise being the more gigantic of the two.  The text of each word is filled with collages that patients at Sobriety Through Out Patient (s.t.o.p) created.  The background is a bunch of colored squares, which occasionally contain a portrait of a patient or staff at S.T.O.P., community member, mural arts person, etc.

I painted that lady's upside down face!

This is the top of the I and S of the "Rise" mural - to give you a sense of the scale.  This mural is painted on "parachute cloth" aka underlining fabric cut into 5' x 5' squares.  This is a relatively recent method of mural painting in Philly - beginning in the 1990's, which allows muralists to paint year round, spend less money on renting scaffolding (the most expensive cost of creating a mural) and allows the public to help out a lot more (the public can only work on the ground level of a mural due to insurance issues if it's painted directly on the wall)

One of the more ridiculous sections of a collage.

A finished section of the mural.

Kien, the lead assistant with no website for me to link you to, rolling up one of the rows of the mural.

One or two days per week, people at S.T.O.P paint within the "paint-by-numbers" style print outs. I spend most of my time re-drawing vertical and horizontal level lines, and cleaning up the squares.  I'm thrilled to be able to brag about how I can now split a ball-point pen line in half when painting straight lines.  I've never been particularly good at straight lines, so this is one hell of an accomplishment for me. (Note: the violin.)

This is usually what we're workin' with.

 I love the tacs! They get really fat with layers of paint!

These are some tacks on the paint-splattered floor - they are impossible to see on it.

A particularly nice tac.

The design of the "Rise" mural.

This is a violin I painted - it's probably four to five feet tall.