Practical Painting

I read in interesting story in my local newspaper (Washington Post) about a teenage artist who had painted a 4 x 21 foot mural at his high school as a reaction (and with encouragement from his art teacher) to the assassination of President Kennedy. He was 17 at the time at The Washington Lee School. As John Kelly's article states, typically high school murals are painted directly on the walls and do not survive renovation. Luckily and wisely, Jon Friedman, the muralist painted his mural on sturdy paper. When The Washington Lee School was torn down, the mural was removed, stored and reframed and reinstalled in the new building. The artist, who is now 62 years old with studios in New York City and Cape Cod seemed pleasantly surprised that his paint and marker rendition survived the test of time.

I think of this of this type of installation all the time. When I painted the public murals for The City of Alexandria and my local, neighborhood Jefferson Houston School, I used hardwood panels as the substrate. Now, the school is possibly being considered for renovation. Luckily they can remove and reinstall these when and if they do any building.

This type of installation is what also got me thinking about reproducing my decorative paintings and murals onto a wallcovering that is repositionable, removable and reusable. This takes the fear out of one-time-sticks-all and mess with traditional wallpaper and allows flexibility in the use.

A little side note humor…When the UPS driver ran his truck into the Hirshorn Museum the other night, The Washington Post poked fun at the "mixed media" installation with this Mark Abramson photo, "Yes, but is it Art?"