(Downtown) Murals being made, part 37: Luis Mena

Luis Gustavo Mena has been painting murals in Tucson since the 1970s. Mena is one of eight artists who was chosen to paint in the first (but, I hope, not the last!) series of new downtown murals. You've seen his work in places like Broadway next to the Garces footbridge, in the new Parque de San Cosme near the fire station downtown, and my favorite (of the ones I've found so far, that is): Native Americans facing Columbus’ ships coming across the Atlantic.

Mena's mural covered a notoriously-tagged corner at the corner of North 6th & East Pennington. Back in 2008, it was one of the first murals we covered on this blog:

    In the Shadows of Downtown

Then the taggers took over, as you can see in this series from Google Street View. (Each link will open a new window or tab. When you close it, this page will still be here.)

• March 2011 (shows the whole mural; the blog entry above doesn't)
• July 2013
• April 2015

Fast-forward to 2016. On May 1st, he had outlines drawn. After the overview (you can click for a closer view, as always) is a closeup looking out from the center. The mural extends onto the curved ceiling:

Here are two photos from May 8th. The outlines are surrounded in blue, and there's a bit of yellow. (That yellow area will change later during the month; look ahead to June 4th.) The first shows the south-facing wall; the other shows the corner and east-facing wall:

There wasn't much change by May 14th:

Let's jump ahead five days to May 19th. The left end looks about the same, but Mena has been working on the right end. There's more golden color and more painted-out area at the right end:

He did a lot of work in the next 11 days! There's color everywhere on May 30th:

On June 4th, the mural is looking nearly finished to me. Mena hasn't needed scaffolding, and he hasn't put barriers around the mural (maybe because it's next to an active sidewalk), so it was hard for me to be sure. Notice the change on the left side of the mural just to the right of the post:

Past sunset on June 11th, he was putting finishing touches on the mural when I caught up with him there:

On June 19th, it looked to me like the mural had been finished:

We'll wrap up this series of eight new murals on Thursday.

(Downtown) Murals being made, part 36: Rachel, Tim and Alexandra

Alexandra Gjurasic, Tim Schirack and Rachel Slick worked together on a mural covering the west side of Café 54. It's the fifth of eight Downtown Murals Project works that we've covered here, from start to finish.

May 1st started the way most of the murals did: a blank wall. This one was off-white or tan (as you can see more clearly at the right side of photos farther below):

The artists didn't start right away. On May 8th I stopped by and saw the outline of mountains at the bottom of the “canvas” — with white behind:

By May 14th, things were happening.Besides the scaffolding, there was a hydraulic lift, art, and some barriers around it all:

On the morning of May 19th, I found the three artists hard at work (with a few kids, as well as passersby stopping to have a look and chat with the artists). I introduced myself and asked if I could take photos.

First, here's Rachel on the lift. She's raising the platform to work on the top right corner of the mural:

When I was there, Alexandra and Tim were painting closer to the ground:

And here's a lucky shot of Rachel painting the very top right corner, which sticks up from the rest of the roof. A plane was flying by in the distance:

On May 30th, the lift was gone and the barricades were scattered. (Don't miss the spider at the top right corner, where Rachel was painting as the plane flew behind.)

June 4th, the stuff was out of the way… and the mural shone:

Two more downtown murals to go! (After the last of the eight new downtown murals comes this blog's tenth-anniversary entry, which will be a doozy.)

(Downtown) Murals being made, part 35: Ignacio Garcia

You may have seen Ignacio Garcia's work at the Park Place Chalk Art Festival. (In each of these blog entries, scroll down and look for the drawings by Jose Ignacio Garcia: 2012, 2015 [look for the incredibly realistic 3-D scorpion], and 2016. I missed the 2014 Festival. And I don't think he was there in 2013.) He's also painted other murals inside and outside Tucson. But the new one on the west side of the Rialto Theatre — which you can see from 5th Avenue a bit north of Broadway — is his most prominent in Tucson, I think.

As some other artists’ did, Ignacio's design evolved after he introduced it in the April 26th meeting at the main library:

Ignacio's original design showed a two-story section of theater. But I wasn't sure which side of the “tower” would have the design, so on May 5th I walked around… and found nothing: no white walls, no scaffolding or hydraulic lifts, etc.

My next trip downtown, May 8th, where I drove and parked (a good place to park — with spaces usually available — is within a few blocks of the three-way intersection of 6th, Toole, and Alameda. There are usually spaces up Toole or along Alameda. From there, all the new murals, except Rock Martinez’, are an easy walk.) Ignacio's mural still didn't seem to be on any of the sides of the Rialto's tower.

May 19th, I caught Ignacio on his hydraulic lift stating to paint the jackalope (which, by the way, is a mythical beast: half jackrabbit, half antelope):

The muralists aimed to finish by May 30th, so I walked to 5th & Broadway to see:

Still a bit more touchup on June 4th:

June 10th, the mural had been signed:

Ignacio replaced the girl riding the jackalope with broadcaster Bill Walton, as you can see in the photo from the original presentation on April 26th:

Sorry for the poor quality. I've emailed Ignacio to ask if he has a better version.

Three more murals to go!

Update: BG Boyd Photo shared this aerial view:

(Downtown) Murals being made, part 34: Rock Martinez

Rock “Cyfi” Martinez’ 55-foot-high mural along 7th Avenue just south of busy 6th Street has made him even more of a celebrity than he already was. (He's been painting murals in Tucson for years — after he was caught, and fined $11,000, for illegal tagging.) There's more in the 2008 Tucson Citizen article Denogean: From tagging to legitimate artwork and a 2010 Arizona Public Media report on graffiti.

So let's jump in and see the mural taking shape. May 1st showed no sign of the mural… just a Benjamin Supply banner:

Fast-forward a week to May 8th near sunset. Unlike most other murals, it looks as if Rock applied his own primer coat. (That's because the finished mural wouldn't cover the entire front of the building.) Also, unlike other artists, Rock has sketched some, painted some — instead of sketching the whole thing ahead, possibly at night with a projector.

On May 10th, I was riding by with a friend, saw Rock walking along the front of his mural, asked her to slow down, grabbed a photo (sorry, Rock, not a very good one) and then we kept going. I'm showing the photo here because some sketched-in areas from the photo above now have some color:

(By the way, I saw a photo in last week's Arizona Daily Star article showing that the woman in the center of the mural is Rock's girlfriend Brandi Watkins.)

Four days later, May 14th,there's a dark blue ring and a painted agave:

Here's a closeup of the bottom left corner on May 15th. The main change was more detail in the prickly pear cactus pads:

May 19th (in higher contrast, to show more detail) the prickly pear pads and the dark ring have texture, and orange saguaro grace both sides of the mural:

A week and a half later, May 30th, the mural is looking basically finished to me. But the hydraulic lift is still there, and the mural hasn't been signed. Anyway, here are a photo of the mural and a photo of Rock with someone — maybe Cristina Perez, who worked with him:

When I stopped by during the day on June 4th, the mural had been signed at the top right corner (with more near the bottom right):

(Note for photographers: The mural was in shadow, but I used the free GIMP editor Intelligent Scissors tool to select the front of the building and the Curves tool to brighten it.)

Just for comparison, here's a photo from Rock's introductory proposal at the open house on April 26th:

Those designs weren't meant to be final, but I thought you might want to check the differences!

I came back on the evening of June 4th, in twilight, and found the mural lit spectacularly:

Next week, we're on to the other half of the murals — the second four murals of the eight.

Update (September 17, 2016): In the middle of Rock's Pinterest page right now is a photo of the mural from above (while he was painting from the big hydraulic lift).

Update: The aerial photo below from BG Boyd Photo gives an overall view:

Tucson 12 video on Downtown Murals Project

@Tucson12 just tweeted a video: “Eight new #murals are beautifying @Downtown_Tucson thanks to a generous grant from the Tohono O’odham Nation.”

Tucson Mural Program (you can click there to view the video fullscreen) from City of Tucson on Tucson 12 via Vimeo.

(Downtown) Murals being made, part 33: Jessica Gonzales

On the Scott Avenue side of Wig-O-Rama, halfway between Congress and Broadway, Jessica Gonzales’ mural started like most of the seven others in the Downtown Murals Project: a blank white wall. It looked like this on May 1st:

Of course, Jessica is an accomplished artist. (She needed to be to make it through the juried process, cutting the list of possible murals down to 16… then the owners of eight walls choosing their favorites.) But this was her first public artwork! She got right to it. By May 8th, the design was sketched out and around ten colors were filled in:

May 14th, the mural looks more than half complete (to me, at least). She seemed to be tweaking the design in a few places… for instance, the yellow color in the tops of the three circles have changed to orange, and the white spaces between the orange are now yellow:

(When I talked with Niki Glen a while ago, she mentioned changing her design a bit as she worked. An artist shouldn't change the design a lot, she pointed out, without asking the owner of the wall. But I can imagine a design changing as the artist sees it close-up, full-sized — instead of the tiny rendering of their original designs.)

When I caught the mural near sunset on May 19th, Jessica had finished more of the detail in the bottom half:

(Note for photographers: I evened out the bright and dark areas with the HDR mode in my camera, then did more darkening and brightening by selecting those areas with the free GIMP editor and applying color Curves to each. I tried balancing the brightness even more than this, but the photo looked a bit unreal.)

On May 30th, Jessica had signed the mural (at the bottom right). The bottom had black outlines that I wasn't sure she was planning to fill in:

I guess the mural is done! The June 16th article in the Star has a photo that looks the same as my June 4th photo:

(The barriers and hydraulic lift are gone, too.) A happy family is posing in front. (I've blurred their faces for privacy.)

Here's the tentative design shown at the Downtown Mural Project design open house April 26th. I snapped a photo from a small piece of paper on a table, so the color differences may be due to my camera, not to a change in Jessica's design:

There are five more new downtown murals to cover. See you on Thursday!

Arizona Daily Star: “9 new murals in downtown scream TUCSON”

Kathleen Allen's article about the Downtown Murals Project was in yesterday's Star, in the Caliente section. If you haven't seen the article, you can click there to read it.

The article includes a mural that wasn't part of the eight Downtown Murals Project artworks: Kati Astreir's mural on 7th at Toole. It also didn't include the new mural on 191 E. Toole or tributes to Prince. But, as I checked the Tucson.com website yesterday evening, it was one of the paper's most popular articles. That's great news for public art in Tucson!

Update (June 19, 2016): If you're walking between Kati Astreir’s mural and Rock Martinez’, don't miss Joe Pagac's spectacular mural next to the tracks where they cross 7th Avenue.

(Downtown) Murals being made, part 32: Issac Caruso

Tucked in a niche along the west side of this niche-like block of Scott Avenue — just north of Congress — is Issac Caruso's new mural, part of the Downtown Murals Project. Isaac's mural is the second we'll cover, start to finish, on this blog. (The story of the first mural we covered — (Downtown) Murals being made, part 31: Niki Glen — went online here earlier this week.)

Isaac worked so quickly that I barely had time to grab photos before he was done! Here's the scene on May 1, after Graffiti Protective Coatings had applied a white primer coat:

As it turned out, he wouldn't use all of the white area. Here's what I saw on May 8th:

Depending on your computer/phone screen, you may not be able to see the design outline. Here's the same photo in high-contrast black-and-white:

I think that Isaac was the first artist to finish his mural. Here it is on May 14th:

Without a super-wide-angle lens and a ladder, it's basically impossible to photograph this mural straight-on. So I did the next best thing: manipulated the heck out of the photo with the free GIMP editor to make it look as if I had. Here's the result:

Let's jump back a month to the mural introduction April 26th. Here's a photo I snapped from the small copy of Isaac's proposed design:

(The color differences may be due to my camera and the editing I did.)

Let's jump ahead again to May 30th. The wall underneath the mural had been white with some exposed brick at the bottom. When I stopped by again on the 30th, that part of the wall was painted blue:

Next Monday, we're on to the story of the next mural!

Update: The aerial view below, from BG Boyd Photo, gives a much better perspective than trying to see this mural from the narrow space below!