See These Famous Celebrity Murals Before They Are Gone

Sad to say, West Hollywood’s famous Palm Restaurant is closing and with it goes its murals of hundreds of celebrities.

This is a classic tourist stop, if you ever go to Hollywood. I’ve never been but I’m interested in seeing these murals.

Celebrity caricatures cover the walls and ceilings. See how many you recognize?

Fortunately they exist on the Los Angeles Eater blog — at least for a while, so get your visual feast while you can.

Speaking of celebrities, I am not an avid daily TV watcher but I confess I indulge in the Kelly & Michael show while I check my morning email. I’m not a football fan either, except for the New Orleans Saints, even though I live in Redskins territory. So it was no surprise that I wasn’t paying too much attention when Terry Crews appeared as one of the guests last week. Actually, I didn’t know who Terry Crews was, even though, upon seeing him, I recognized that I had seen him in various movies as well as old Old Spice commercials. I looked up his profile on Wikipedia and was surprised to learn his football career started with the Rams as a defensive end/ linebacker, and then the San Diego Chargers, moving to the Washington Redskins and ending with the Philadelphia Eagles. No surprise though that these guys get moved around a lot. Tough world to be in football and then to age. He retired in 1997 and started his acting career. He was on this morning show to promote his role as the new host for Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Coincidentally, Regis, Kelly’s former co-host and founder of her show, also hosted this game show.

What I was really surprised to learn and the whole reason I’m mentioning this, is that Terry Crews was a fine arts major. This is how he got his start and always fell back on drawing and art when things were tough. For instance, when he was cut from a team, he used to draw his fellow football members’ mugs in the locker room and sell them the more refined, painted-portraits when he was out of work for a while for about $5,000 a painting. Very smart! Here is some of his artwork and some real talent too!

It took him about 2 months do complete a painting of this realistic caliber.

From the Daily Caller:

Regretfully, none of this detail is mentioned on his Wikipedia page, except for this:

He received a Chrysler-sponsored art scholarship at the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. This achievement was soon followed by an Art Excellence scholarship and a full-ride athletic scholarship for football at Western Michigan University.

This is just another example of finding Art is Everywhere and sometimes in the least expected places.

Doing a little more research, I discovered that Terry Crews’ art background was revealed on the Jimmy Kimmel show earlier in the month. Here’s the clip that also shows his exuberant personality. What a fascinating career and how he came up the ranks through art as Flint Michigan’s sketch artist. Gosh, he was doing this work when I was graduating from college! Quite an ‘animated’ and likeable character!