Steam engine coming out of a tunnel

Hello my sweet friends, and lovers of art, and lovers of wild artists!

Whew, I know I keep saying it but yikes!!!  It’s hot out there!  I started this mural on the first day of our 18 day 90+ degree run, and now we are having another late-August record-breaker heat wave. The ambient air temp coming off the gravel was 116 when I left the mural today.   But, there is definitely a shift in the weather.  It is dark in the mornings now and I have to start later, closer to 6am than 5am (yeah…no, I am not complaining, I love having to stay all snuggled and asleep in my yummy bed for an extra hour).  Now it is cool in the mornings, 60ish, so I am wearing a fleece and drinking my coffee hot instead of iced, and today is the first day I wore pants that go all the way to the ground.  Other than that, it’s business as usual out there on the mural wall.

Things are starting to move fast now.  We are over half way done.  Everything is blocked in, most of the details on the upper half of the mural are done, I plan to say good-bye to the scissor lift and just use ladders and decks to complete all of the foreground details. This week it’s all about the trains. (Get it?  “Training your mural”? Hee hee!)  The caboose entering a tunnel on the east side of the building is finished, and I am working on the steam engine emerging from the tunnel on the far west end of the mural.  The challenge now isn’t just corrugations, it’s also two double slide windows of the offices of our friends at Excel Electrical, which just happen to fall right smack in the middle of the tunnel and train.  So I am just painting right over the glass…it’s amazing what these people are letting me get away with.  The master plan is to paint the glass, then photograph the window area and have it converted to that graphic film that you see wrapping buses and cars with ads – the film covers the windows, but from the inside you don’t see the image, but you can see out just like a regular window.  I have no idea how this works, but I believe in it like I firmly believe in Santa and World Peace and True Love and all the benevolent, possibly-imaginary things that make my little world happy.

I’ll let you know how that all works out for me…

You may have noticed that the mural is conveniently located parallel to – and about 20 yards from – train tracks.  Niwot officially began as a train stop for farmers to load their sugar beets onto the train to be delivered to the sugar mill in Longmont.  (Unofficially, Niwot was home to a tribe of Arapaho Indians who, of course, didn’t actually come from India so why are they called Indians anyway, something to do with lost sailors and the alleged West Indies, which apparently  is not a Seattle film/music genre,  and there is no way out of this non-politically-correct spiral, except to say that it was theirs and they got kind of sick of us moving in and taking up all the space, and I’m not actually saying, officially or unofficially, that we are all descendants of settlers with somewhat questionable boundaries, but I am saying that the tribe left and now we live in this valley and it’s full of Starbucks instead of Buffalo, but you can get Buffalo Burgers at the Niwot Tavern and really good coffee at several delightful venues in town… I don’t really know what all that means . . .   but sometimes I wonder… where are we going and what are we doing in this hand basket?).

So here we are, technically, historically a train town and every day while I am painting, several randomly-scheduled freight trains roll by.  The engineers are piecing together that we are not just vandals out there wreaking havoc on random building walls in the blazing heat and/or early semi-darkness, under grasshopper attack (what’s up with all the mural-loving grasshoppers this summer??!!), but we are actual artists creating something resembling art, and they are beginning to warm up to the whole show.  Now they wave and smile as they roll by, and on several occasions the track maintenance guys who drive the rails in adapted pickup trucks actually stop and check it out and offer us water and encouragement.  It’s like having a very loud rolling fan club.

The Flowers To The People Fundraiser is going great!!  The Flower painting is scheduled for the week of September 12-17.  If you have already signed up and made your donation of $25 or more (thankyouthankyouthankyou!!) then you are receiving email updates from me and you know when to come out and paint.  If you haven’t signed up yet, please get your name on the list, I don’t want you to miss out on this fantastic, history-making opportunity.  You can come see me at the mural at 2^nd Ave and the Diagonal Hwy Mon-Fri 6am-1pm-ish or go to Wise Buys Antiques at 190 2^nd Ave in Old Town Niwot and sign up.

As always, thanks again for your love and support and horn honks and waves and hugs and donuts and observations of my mental health (that girl’s crazy!!).  You are the reason I get to do what I love to do, and I love you for it!

caboose - blocking in shape and color

Caboose with shading and detail

me, training my mural.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 at 9:48 am and is filed under Mural Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.