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SHINE artist likes to keep things organic

Bill DeYoung

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From SHINE 2020: Artist Mason Schwacke working at 1410 3rd Street SE. Photo by Bill DeYoung

Every painting has to start with an idea.

Mason Schwacke’s contribution to this year’s SHINE Mural Festival began with an idea from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.

“They were very specific, NOAA,” Schwacke said Saturday while applying touches of paint to the emerging concrete canvas. “They said they wanted the giant manta ray, the scalloped hammerhead, the sawfish and the white-tip shark. They said those four critters had to be incorporated into the composition.”

The St. Petersburg Arts Alliance is co-presenting SHINE 2020 with the PangeaSeed Foundation and NOAA, and so each of the 11 murals going up around the city has to have a “save the oceans” theme. Schwacke’s designated topic is “Species at Risk.”

He and his longtime artistic collaborator C.J. Thomas created a “bar napkin” sketch of what they wanted the project to look like. It had to be approved by NOAA – not for artistic reasons, for anatomical reasons. They wanted to be sure the depicted fish looked … correct.

On Friday night, Schwacke and Thomas went to the site – it’s the empty Hawk Diesel building at 1410 3rd Street SE – lit up and cleaned, and base-painted, the 12×43 foot west-facing wall.

Then they got all artistic.

Saturday, mid-afternoon. The first full day of work for Thomas (left) and Schwacke.

A majority of mural artists will use a machine to project their image onto the surface. Schwacke doesn’t work that way.

“Yes, it would be a little bit more easy to just blast it on a projector and trace everything out,” he explained, “but to actually freehand and loosey-goosey sketch everything, it becomes a little more organic with the design.

“We had the logistics and the parameters set out, but when you actually get onto the wall to do it a little bit more freehand, it just makes the composition more true, more organic to the actual canvas, so to speak.”

Inevitably, once artists and wall are face-to-face, things have to be altered. There are windows, a power meter and vinyl soffit to work with, and around. So fish fins move a little. Blue waves shift. At the last minute, an image of the sun was added, around one of the windows.

By Sunday, the picture was coming into focus. Thomas had been the last to leave the day before – the artists will work until their light is gone, or until they’re simply worn out from the heat and the task at hand.

As he was putting the hydraulic lift away for the night, a passer-by helped himself to Thomas’ bottles of water, PediaLyte and Gatorade. “And then grabbed the hose and started spraying the wall down.” Luckily, most of that day’s paint had already dried.

SHINE artists enjoy chatting with the bikers, walkers and joggers who stop by to watch the process. The overwhelming percentage of visitors are positive and encouraging. Sometimes they even offer to help.

Since beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder, both Schwacke and Thomas take frequent steps back to see how the mural will look from the sidewalk or the street. And additional fine-tuning changes get made.

“You’ve got to take into account that on any of these walls, the majority of the time people are going to be going by at least 30 miles an hour,” said Thomas. “It’s nice to put all the details in, like really fine details for people walking by, but the overall image and composition has to be striking when somebody’s going by at like 40 or 50.

“It’s almost like sign work. If you put too many letters on a sign, no one’s gonna get your message.”

 

 

 

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