Summer, August 6-September 4, 2nd City Council Art Gallery & Performance Space, Long Beach, CA, Juried Group Show, "Watershed I" chosen, Second Place awarded.
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Doheny State Beach Visitor Center Mural Project ("Watershed" triptych)
California State Parks is completely renovating their Visitor Center at Doheny State Beach in Dana Point. Part of the renovation is to create a fully functioning, 3 dimensional tide pool exhibit that teaches visitors about the connection between life in the ocean and the watershed of the coast. Behind the tide pool will be a mural that depicts the landscape around a typical Southern California tide pool. I have created the paintings that will become that mural.
The above image is a much reduced scan of a 4' x 16' painting I began working on in April 2010. Three paintings, actually - not only would one canvas that size not fit in my house but it would be very difficult to construct. Once the paintings were completed in November, the three canvases were then scanned at a very high resolution. State Parks will enlarge the the scans and fabricate them onto durable, waterproof materials that will adhere to a wall in the Visitor Center. The finished size of the mural will be approximately 7' x 28'. Instead of painting a mural directly upon the wall, State Parks decided it would be more efficient to scan the paintings in order to fabricate water proof (and child proof) art that can be replaced if damaged without recreating an entire mural or section of a mural each time.
The mural depicts several things. It shows some of the life bird, plant and animal life that makes use of San Juan Creek that empties into the ocean at Doheny State Beach. It also shows that all freshwater from the land ends up in the ocean, whether it is runoff from the stream or the water from washing a car. Where the land meets the ocean has been the major theme of my work since I started painting. While the mural is a semi-fictional landscape, not a true or realistic depiction of San Juan Creek, the goal for it is to be both educational and a landscape painting. I created the draft in Photoshop from 30+ layers of photographs that I took around Dana Point and Southern California. Creating the draft was as interesting and important part of the project as the painting is (though considerably faster). Since there is very little non-urban, open space in Coastal Orange County, State Parks and I wanted to create an idea of what the area might have been like before development.
This has been an exciting and challenging project for me on many levels. Everything I have learned over the past few decades has come into play here: my work as a graphic artist (knowing Photoshop and finding a resource that could scan very large paintings at 600 dpi - many thanks to Aztek Scanning in Irvine!), as a student of the flora and fauna of coastal California, and as a painter.
The painting and scanning portion of the project was completed in December 2010. In May of 2011, plans for one of the walls next to the mural were changed, and State Parks asked me to extend the ocean and sky portion of the mural onto this wall. They also asked me to as blend the color of the sky in mural onto the ceiling above the tide pool exhibit. My work with this project is not yet done. Unless plans change more, the Doheny State Beach Visitor Center project should be completed in late 2011 or early 2012.
Other New or Recent Works
 Above the Sky (You Will Always Stay) |
 We'll Catch Up Some Other Time |