(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!

(Downtown) Murals being made, part 31: Niki Glen

Starting with an introductory meeting on April 28, the Downtown Murals Project brightened downtown with eight new murals. This entry and the next seven will show the murals from start to finish.

In this first entry, we'll see artist Niki Glen's mural being made. It's at the corner of 5th & Toole Avenues. Here's a part of a Tucson 12 video on the Downtown Murals Project showing an interview with Niki, and she and her friends working on the mural. Click on the video to view it fullscreen:

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

Niki's mural is special because it wraps around a box-like airshaft to something underground (parking, maybe?). Let's look at photos. The mural started the same way that all of the others did: a white primer coat applied (and supplied) by Graffiti Protective Coatings. Here are the south side, then the north side, on May 1st:

The south side has a jog in the middle; the north side has a pole at its middle.

As you'll see in the next blog entries, different artists worked at different paces. Fast-forward a week to May 8th. The north side has the design sketched on the left (east) end of the wall:

The south side was partly blocked by porta-potties at the right (east) end — probably for an event that weekend — but the design at the left end was really taking shape. Here are an overview and a closeup showing the middle of the left half:

I drove by on May 10th and saw artists at work. Naturally, I pulled over in a hurry :) and introduced myself. Niki and another artist, Judy Van Naerssen, had some nice shade set up (which most of the other artists didn't). Here are Judy sketching with charcoal and Niki applying paint to the design:

May 14th, there was lots of color on the south side (where you saw Niki painting, above), an outline on the east side, and some color on the north:

(As always, you can click on a photo for a larger view.)

Near sunset on May 19th, the mural looked almost finished. Here's the north side, left (east) and right (west) ends:

In the next photo, you can see that the east end isn't painted yet; the rest of the photo shows the right (north) side:

The last views of May 19th are of the south side — first the west (left) end and then the east:

May 30th: Right on schedule, I think we're done! (I didn't ask Niki, but the mural looks complete to me.) I'll start with a view from the southeast:

(The nice illumination and color balance are thanks to the great RAW mode in my Panasonic Lumix “point-and-shoot” camera and the compensation I can do in the free Silkypix Developer Studio 4.4 SE editing software.)

Next, from the southwest corner, looking east:

(Here's another photo-geek note. The shade/sun balance in this photo is thanks to the Lumix HDR mode — which lots of digital cameras have these days. I used the free GIMP editor to juice up the saturation, which made the mural look more like it actually did to me.)

Last, the north side of the mural: left (east), then right (west). I took one photo, but I'll split it into two pieces so you can see more detail:

I can't wait to show you the other seven murals! Stay tuned these coming four weeks.

The man who has no imagination has no wings...

Google Alerts caught a Friday story on Tucson News Now:

       Tucson artist honors Muhammad Ali with mural

I emailed a link to David Aber. He lives not far away from Smitty's Car Wash (off of Sarnoff and Broadway), and he just sent me two photos…

I searched the Web for muhammad ali quotes and (of course :) came up with plenty. The title of this blog entry is one of them.

Here's Dave's close-up:

If/when we get a photo of mural with the bottom completed, I'll update this blog entry.

Update (June 28, 2016): David sent a photo of the completed mural yesterday. It wasn't easy to fit the whole mural into a single photo, but he did it.

(You're “the champ,” David! Thanks!)

IMDS' pop-up mural on Sixth Avenue

Yesterday, I saw a photo and tweet about a new mural:

(Blogger didn't want me to use Twitter's “Embed Tweet” feature, so I copied the photo and made a screen grab of the tweet.) Anyway, I tweeted back to Becky to ask where the mural was. But then I zooomed in on the photo and saw a “Congress Street” sign in the background, which was a good clue. I was downtown this evening; I found the mural just after sunset, across 6th Avenue from the Ronstadt Transit Center, just north of Congress:

The “imago dei” at the right side was enough to lead me to this Facebook entry from Imago Dei Middle School:

Imago Dei Middle School, Tucson added 5 new photos.
June 7 at 12:23pm

The exuberant students on the right side of the mural echo a photo of graduates at the top of the IMDS Facebook page.

The mural looks to be on a construction wall in front of the old “The Arizona Hotel” (which I found on a Google Street View image from April 2015). So, see it while you can.

Skateboarding danger!

There used to be a skateboard shop named BLX on this corner. They had different local artists paint a mural, every month or two, behind a skate-able bench. You could jump your board onto the bench and ride across the front of the mural.

If you'd like to see the BLX murals, use the mural search box (at the right side of this blog — or, more reliably, the box near the top of the TucsonArt.info murals page)… then search for BLX.

BLX is gone. (Last I saw their place, they'd moved closer to 4th Avenue.) Their (literally! :) rotating murals are gone, too. In their place for the past months — starting, at least, when I snapped this photo on March 5th — is this menacing (I'm pretty sure it's a) leopard. (I made my guess by doing a Bing Images search for leopard jaguar panther difference.)

I don't think I'd be too comfortable riding a board past that. :)

Update (June 17, 2016): The Arizona Daily Star article 9 new murals in downtown scream TUCSON has a long sidebar with much more information about the mural and artist Kati Astraeir (who — at least, a couple of years ago — had a studio in that building… see her amazing rotating artwork for Burning Man at the end of our blog entry here: New on Toole in 2013 (and Happy 2014!)). Although Kati's mural was included in the article as one of the new downtown murals, the article didn't include other recent murals downtown — for instance, Joe Pagac's mural, and another artist's stencils, commemorating Prince. Whatever… the article has lots of great information about muralists and their work downtown.
Update (December 2, 2017): I just found the Center for Biological Diversity 2016 page about this mural's unveiling: Tucson Mural Honoring America's Only Known Jaguar to Be Unveiled May 19.
Update (August 19, 2019): The mural is gone; there's just a rough patch of wall in its place.

Tile surprise at Pima County Extension

A fun tile mural is near the parking lot at Pima County Extension on Campbell just south of the Rillito. (Click there to open the page with more photos and details on the gardens. It's part of the Tucson's Pocket Parks blog.)

I snapped the photo on May 14th during one of the Saturday tours.

A few bold underwater humans and alien fish (?)

The mural on the northwest wall of 191 E. Toole (next to the parking lot) used to have a bizarre but also oddly welcoming scene of what looked like exterrestrial beings mixed into classic Tucson Scenes. That was back when the Skrappy's youth center occupied the building. That mural mostly disappeared around the time that another organization took over. Then the “Be Bold.” mural appeared, with parts of the formal extraterrestrial mural around the edges. Here's the photo I snapped on March 5th:

(I'd actually seen the Be Bold mural before the newer one, which is in the back of that photo above. You can see the Be Bold mural at the end of the May 5th entry.)

Here's a closeup. (As always, you can click for a larger view.)

Update (March 29, 2017): The underwater mural with the clown fish is by Joe Pagac.

Updates (November 24, 2017): Today's entry Much better photos of Joe Pagac's underwater mural has closeups.

Maybe a mural, part 68

From time to time, we come across a flat piece of art that isn't actually painted on the wall. Or maybe it's on a wall, but it has a three-dimensional part. What's a mural purist to do? I don't know about you, but I throw up my hands, say “whatever”… and let you decide what you think. (To me, this question smacks of the typical academic discussion “That isn't art!” “Yes, that is art! Consider [some art expert]’s definition.” I say: If you look it it, and you like it or don't, at least you'll have seen something you haven't before… fairly flat and probably on a wall. ;-) In the meantime…

This was on the outside east wall of the building housing George Strasburger's studio, March 5. It was hung on a wooden frame, so who knows when it will go? (I saw it again a few weeks ago.)

Update: An anonymous blog reader posted a comment sometime later. Here it is, with clickable links:

Here is a link to the artist that created that mural - https://marcusrobiason.blogspot.com/. He has a studio in the building where the mural is located (Pleasure World Gallery); you can google his work by searching for Marcus Robiason - https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvGfiw0CPNTn6zQZTUAvMxvHc9rHrgP4RqjJZFUBuRtkTPx7Lz7e9tyAg_YgTKM27Kcn2X3SZAwfcItPSAG_qeKV9t7hIF4cR-8vQF3Sc-ydijROiYjf893FiBAE7hA42eUK4K/s1600/portrait1.jpg. Perhaps you can give him some credit and link reference as you've done for others that your featured on your site. And I should add that his work is ART and in a sense it is more artistic (pure) than much of the work conformist stylized paintings currently featured on your site.

Update (November 30, 2021): There's a new mural in the same spot by the same artist. In this post, Marcus writes about his style and how he paints.

When we update murals...

… we usually add a note at the end of the old blog entry, titled “Updated:”, with the date we added the update and a sentence or two about it.

Blogger seems to have changed that. It used to be that an updating a post would simply change the page. Now Blogger has started emailing a copy of the entire updated article, as if it were new. (If you don't recognize the post, look at the bottom of it for the update (which I add by hand) and the original posting date (which Blogger adds), such as:

Update (January 7, 2014) Mark Fleming came back to shoot photos of some new murals here in WintaFresh 2013 revisited.

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Posted By Jerry Peek to The Tucson Murals Project at 2/16/2013 10:46:00 PM

So long, WintaFresh

When muralist Rock Martinez lived in Tucson, he hosted a yearly weekend of mural painting — with artists from around the country — on the vacant lot south of Und1sputed Fitness on Stone (a bit north of Speedway). The walls have been filled with great urban art every year. But Rock moved to Minnesota a year ago or so. Some of the murals from WintaFresh 2013, including some later murals that Mark Fleming found in January 2014, stayed (mostly?) up for a while. When I stopped by on February 4th, 2016, some of the murals had changed and some were the same.

The north side of the lot (the south side of Und1sputed Fitness) looked about the same:

But the south side of the lot was completely different. Here it is, from left (east) to right (west):

When I drove by a couple of weeks ago, I noticed (out of the side of my eye… I remember landmarks by their murals) that (at least) the south wall has changed. I'll go back, when the friendly people at Und1sputed let me into their lot (they always do), then I'll show you what I find.