Hello lovers of Art!

Whew, big mural day today!  The tunnel and caboose on the north side of the building were blocked in today, meaning that the colors were laid in without added detail.  It was a long day, but I wanted to get the barn finished, get the rail fence started, and then block in the tunnel with this huge caboose – maybe too big, I’ll have to rethink it tomorrow.  I want it to be visible from way down the highway, but still work with the rest of the mural design scale.   Tonight is Niwot’s Rhythm on the Rails, our community’s free music festival every Thursday evening through the summer.  (check it out at www.niwot.com) Tonight legendary Hazel Miller is performing, and I have to write fast because I desperately need a nap and even more desperately, a shower (you’re welcome, people of Niwot) so I can dance dance dance!

 

So I don’t think I mentioned the Pies yet . . .  The mural is being painted on the exterior wall of Niwot’s home town electrical contracting company – Excel, not to be confused with the behemoth  power company that showed up years later, and misspells it’s own name:  Xcel.  (really?  They make a gozillion dollars a year, couldn’t they afford a spell checker??)  Anyway, the folks at our Excel Electric are delightful, hardworking electricians who show up early every morning, wave and chat and comment on the mural, then go off to brighten people’s lives throughout Boulder county for the day.  There are about a dozen vans heading off every morning, and I want to make progress on the mural for them so they will know how much I appreciate them when they come back at the end of their day.  

 

But you may not know a little secret about the Excel Building – on the far north end is a small kitchen run by my new friends at My Mom’s Pie company (check them out! www.mmpies.com ).  Jeff and Kini run this little pie company, and they are in the mural-adjacent kitchen baking pies all day every day.  Their windows open out on the mural wall (a design dilemma for the mural process not yet clearly resolved . . .) and all day as I paint, I am surrounded by the wafting fragrance of cinnamon and apples, berries and toasting pecans, and the delicate buttery scent of pie crust.  The worst part is, the pies taste even better than they smell….

 

Last week I bought a blackberry-raspberry pie and had it for breakfast every day because, as you know, breakfast is the most important pie of the day.  Then today William, one of the happy bakers of these slices of heaven, delivered a 3″ mini apple pie to the scissor lift.  I was hesitant at first because tiny pies tend to have a too much crust to gooey-goodness ratio.  This one was heaven.  Some how these pie people have managed to make the crust so thin and delicate that the filling is still the star.  I don’t know how they do it, I’m sure it involves nano-technology and tree elves, but they do it perfectly and I am now their pie-slave and I am eating it every day (the strawberry-rhubarb today halted work for several minutes while I fought back tears of pie joy).

 

So the pie is now part of the artist, and also part of the mural.  Not only is the wafting fragrance of baking pie infused into the paint as it goes onto the mural wall, but if you look closely at the small tipi village painted below Haystack Mountain, you will notice a small curl of smoke rising from the tipi on the far right.  That’s an artist’s rendition of pie smell.

 

Alright, time for a shower and a nap before I head off to another fun summer evening in my sweet little town.  Tomorrow I have to decide what to do about the train.  And stay tuned for my next blog entry where I ask the obvious question – does all this pie make my caboose look big???