TRAVERSE CITY — A thousand-plus down, a thousand-plus to go.
The Community Mural Project is at the halfway point, with more than 1,000 of its 2,600 tiles painted, and several public painting sessions yet to go. The next will take place at Ace Hardware on Saturday, July 17, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The mural is a project of Artcenter Traverse City, which has held several community painting events since spring. For $5, artists and non-artists alike can paint a six-inch square of aluminum-and-plastic tile in a designated color pattern. When assembled, the tiles will form a colorful 13-by-50-foot mural on the side of Maxbauer Ace Hardware on West Front Street.
The first of the tiles were installed this spring, with more expected to go up this week.
The mural is a cropped version of Traverse City artist Charles Murphy's "Festival Time," which depicts downtown Traverse City and its "bayscape" during the National Cherry Festival. The image is part of Murphy's 2008 commemorative oil painting for the festival, which gave permission for its reproduction on the wall.
"There were half a dozen ones we liked," said Ace Hardware store manager Jason Gothard, who helped choose the image from about 40 submitted in an Artcenter members-only call for entries. "That one kind of jumped because of summertime, community."
"It looked like Traverse City," added store operations manager Shawn O'Brien.
Longtime mural artist Terry Dickinson is co-directing the project, the largest community mural project he has undertaken. It's also one of the most challenging..
"It's the logistics — making sure we don't lose a piece of the picture or a piece of tile," said Dickinson, who has completed between 500 and 800 murals in his 36-year career. The image itself presents another pair of challenges.
"One is the amount of negative space and simplistic tiles," he said, referring to its vast expanses of water and sky. "I'm having a hard time getting water done because people are choosing more colorful tiles. And then at the other extreme, these very impressionist, complex pieces that are too hard for people to capture.
"The challenge will be to take these sections and assemble them and make sure this impressionistic feel from Charlie gets carried over."
Last week's Cherry Festival was the site of the largest community painting session so far. Over the weeklong event, Artcenter volunteers helped hundreds of apron-clad visitors paint tiles at portable painting stations complete with easels, paint, brushes, water and plastic wrap for texturing.
"People find this difficult and intimidating, but once you stick that brush in and learn a few techniques, it's fun," said Artcenter Events Coordinator Dave Lawrence, who used all his arts of persuasion to get passers-by to "make your mark on the wall."
"We're trying to get people to discover that there's something in them yearning to get out," he said.
Amateur artist Dorothy McCormick was the first to step up. She chose a tile that featured several shades of blue water and two white spots that could have been boat sails.
"It reminded me of the swan on my pond, and I thought someday when I come back to look at my tile on the mural, I'll know where to find it," said McCormick, of Williamsburg.
Seeing the results as thousands of artists of varying skill levels try to reproduce his work has been a joy to Murphy.
"I'm watching (the mural) go up on the wall, and it's a whole lot of fun," said the artist, who has volunteered tips and techniques at some of the community painting sessions. "I'm always into surprises."
A time-lapse video camera mounted near the wall will capture the action as the mural takes shape, and the footage will become part of a video about the project, said project co-director Kathy Lienau. Organizers hope to enter the project in a national community art project contest.
When the mural is completed in September or October, organizers plan to throw a community christening party, she added. Catalogs of the numbered tiles and their place on the wall will be located at Ace Hardware and Artcenter Traverse City, Dickinson said.
The Community Mural Project is a fundraiser for the nonprofit Artcenter, which has been hard hit by the recession, Lienau said. But it also calls attention to the organization and to public art.
"A lot of people don't know we're there. This has really helped us be known more," she said. "Since we started this we have been asked to do five or six other projects in town. What we really like is the community involvement and that's why we've gone out of our way to include people who don't paint."
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