All Parties End In The Kitchen

Wide view showing the entire kitchen mural.

This view orients toward the kitchen but here I wanted especially to show you the beautiful compass rose in the floor.

My Wadmalaw Island mural  project was one big mural or a set of four murals depending on how you look at it. Especially while working on it we had to think of it as four separate murals. 

Studio view. Our light there tended to be on the cool side as you can see.
Note the dividing line. There's a door between those two parts.

The first panel  is cut and waiting on the floor to be hung.

Alan Cooper and company hang the first panel. The kitchen portion of my mural.

The goal is always to have as few pieces as possible but there are actually more than four pieces owing to the interior architecture which includes single and double doorways. It doesn't make sense to include a blank space in the painting where a door would go. The sections of the mural above the doors were painted separately and so there are seams above the doors which are essentially invisible. Therefore the mural is one continuous unbroken picture plane of more than 140 feet.

My abstract corner. Channeling Clifford Still.

The mirrored door to the office open hides the corner and reflects more of the hall.

Another view of the corner and more of the kitchen wall reflected.

In truth it's all abstract to me. To paraphrase Magritte,  'This is not a landscape.'

 Oh, but don't get me started on the math. There's so much math to making a mural and I'm not crazy about that part. Or perhaps I should say it threatens to drive me crazy. 

Looking down the hall to the office. The kitchen is on the left.

One of my first assignments for my assistant, Christophe Cassidy,  was to tackle the math, to figure out the puzzle of all the pieces and how they fit on the stretched fabric. Of course we'd check and recheck each other's calculations and sometimes we'd have to remind ourselves what part of the project we were painting.

The low country.

Looking into the kitchen.

Half of the kitchen portion of my Wadmalaw Island mural.

Double doors to the kitchen.

 "All parties end up in the kitchen," Christophe would say to remind us that we were on the last part of the painting and it was indeed the kitchen. I think he was particularly excited to be in the home stretch (see photo).

Overlapping shots of the same area next to the kitchen double doors.

Same shot as above in perspective.

I love this sort of tangle of growth common to the wild parts of Wadmalaw.

Christophe jumping for joy. We're done!
This is a studio view and you'll note the break allowing for the double doors to the kitchen.

We're done but I'm not! Here I'm adding some painting over the door on site.
Work that would have been too difficult to match up in the studio.

Click on Tumblr for more pictures of this and other projects. Thanks!