Sunday, August 31, 2008

Prime Climb Mural












For the last six days I have been working on painting a 7 000 square foot space at Prime Climb located in Wallingford, Connecticut. It was an enormous project with a strict time line and has left me exhausted. The object of the project was to create a sandstone type texture and color palette to cover the existing walls in which people climb upon. I approached the task without any real game plan and at first was really unsure to what the final out come would be. In the end I think the overall out come was decent and I learned a lot of great tricks for this type of work along the way.

This was a special project for me as I have been climbing for the past 11 years on the same walls in which I was hired to paint.
The highlight of this particular painting was creating the gigantic desert arch and the stylized sky that is set behind it. At first the plan was to render a realistic sky by quickly misting some white and grey layers on top of the blue. In the end the sky turned out rather stylized, and what to me looks like a mix of Japanese Woodcuts, Thai Religious Art, Cotton Candy, Graffiti, with a Regionalist twist .Maybe it was the lack of oxygen to my brain resulting from the enormous time I spent wearing a respirator.
Another cool aspect of completing this project is that it is truly a form of interactive art, and people will be climbing on the imagery that I created.
I plan to post some video of this in the near future!!!!