The front of the former Macy's department store at Park Place Mall has been closed for years, covered over and vacant. It turned out to be the perfect place for a community mural. The Desert Pen — muralist Pen Macias — designed a mural with lots of room in the middle for contributions from Tucsonans.
Before we look at the mural being made from start to finish, here it is finished on September 24th:
All of the spots drifting from the dandelion are seeds painted onto pieces of wood by community members. Pen posted the video below on Instagram to explain. (In the blog preview, the video looks distorted to me: wider than it should be, so people look big. If you'd like to open the video in a new window, here's a link:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAMnKUvSZ5l/.)
As the video shows, the dandelion seeds in the middle took a long time to make! Painting the mural itself was done in a week, with the seeds added near the end. September 14th, there was a blank wall with the design sketched. Here's what I saw late the next afternoon, September 15th:
The mural at the ceiling, in the arch, is one of a series through Park Place that Jos Villabrille painted ten years ago or more. The designs are spectacular… for instance, this mural has agave spilling out of the mural into the air below. You can see more murals in our March 2, 2015 entry,
Our 1,000th post: Jos at Park Place mall.
Closeups with lines sketched for what will be coming soon:
This sign was in front of the mural:
I came back on September 21 to see the finished mural. There's a photo of the whole mural at the top of this post. Here are closeups — first, the left and right ends:
Next, parts of the dandelion seeds. All the seeds have designs inside, and some have words:
The artist signed her mural in the top right corner:
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