Murals! In Saint Paul!

Minnesota recently had its first mural festival: Chroma Zone. Twelve murals were painted over eight days or just a bit more (because of travel difficulties and interminable rain) in an area of Saint Paul called the Creative Enterprise Zone. They started on September 6 and finished some time the week after September 14.

It was great to watch the murals coming together. I have so much admiration for the artists, who worked so hard throughout the week in difficult conditions, and for everyone who provided the infrastructure to make it possible: the Creative Enterprise Zone organization, Forecast Public Art, and Burlesque of North America.

Here are the murals in process and as final works.


The three artists of ArtCrop (Christina Vang, Teeko Yang, and Oskar Ly) got underway quickly on the first day on the back wall of Oak Tree Arts...


...ending with this graphic homage to plants, both alien and terrestrial.

The mysterious artist Biafra Inc. also started fast with this on the first day at BroTex:


I didn't know what that black outline was supposed to be...


...but soon it became eyes...


...and glasses...


... and then the glasses had sinking ships reflected in them. The BroText building is about the equivalent of five stories wide, by the way.

Cey Adams is probably the best-known artist in the festival (check out his Wikipedia page!). He was painting on the side of Hampden Park Co-op:








Cey got a lot done in the last 24–36 hours when the rain finally broke for a while. All of these background gradation bars were painted with a brush:




No spray cans used on this mural...

Chuck U's mural on Spot Weld started off really fast. This was fairly early on the first morning:


And he had gotten this far on just the second day:


But it turned out, Chuck planned to outline every bit of that color in black and so that's why he had left so much time in the schedule.


This was on the third or fourth day, during a break in the rain. That's Chuck U painting black outlines in the lower left corner.


The finished piece is amazing, with lots of great details.






Claudia Valentino and Daniela Biamchini tackled a large wall at Precision Coatings with paint and glass:


Here they are on the first day, with the glass an mirror pieces laid out on the ground. They were the only ones to use material other than paint on their wall.


I'm not capturing the scale of this one very well:


Eric. J. Garcia's mural is on the north wall of E-Z Recycling (near Can Can Wonderland). Here he is drawing his mural on one of the early days:


And midway:


And the finished work:


There are a lot of details in there worth exploring. Eric's work did the most of all the murals with incorporating parts of the building into the design, such as these pipes....


...and the windows, as if they were recycling bins:


Ewok painted his mural at Tech Dump:


It started out with dark under-painting...


...and then one day he brightened it up...


...he kept adding details...


... and ended here:


It seems to me that Ewok could do science fiction book covers.

Fadlabi, whose wall is on the north wall at Wycliff, arrived late for Chroma Zone because he was held up by U.S. Customs on his way from Norway. When he finally got started midway through the week, he moved pretty quickly. The orange and white went up first (and got streaked by rain), then this rough painting of the people on the motorcycle:


This is the finished piece:


Because it's such a large wall, I have to have a close-up of the traveling family:


Mariela Ajras, painting on a west wall at Wycliff, also arrived a bit late, and her mural was four stories tall. She got her outline up a few days into the festival and then the rain set in:


But she finished nonetheless:


Martzia Thometz painted two murals on the Universe Building:




I didn't get a process shot of Martzia's work because my one attempt was blurry. Her site is immediately adjacent to a busy street, so there's nowhere to stand to take a photo most of the time.

Another artist I didn't catch doing their work was Mr. Kiji, who painted on the wall above the patio at Dual Citizen Brewing:


(Well, I did, but it looked as though he was just standing on the lift with his back to the camera in front of an empty white square, so it wasn't very interesting.)


And the last muralist is Priscila de Carvalho, working at Budget Sign Shop"


I wish I had gotten more process shots of Priscila at work!


If you're in the area and you want to visit the murals, here's a link to a printable map showing all of the locations.