LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Earlier this month, the hiss of spray paint cans battled with the noise of freight trucks rumbling down Portland’s 15th street as a group of artists banded together to work on a commercially commissioned painting - a paying gig for something they did clandestinely as kids.
“Like graffiti and that kind of stuff - but lately we have been going into more a fine art direction,” said Ian Muldoon, who along with Jeremy Lewis, Max Thomas and Jacob Duncan make up the artist group Often Seen Rarely Spoken.
It’s not only an artist collective but a business venture the quartet talked about launching early last year. During the summer, Lewis and Muldoon quit their full-time jobs to completely commit to what they call OSRS. It’s a fairly new kind of business model in Louisville.
The wall of the warehouse they painted is owned by KFI, a commercial furniture manufacturer and a long-time Portland business run by Chris Smith.
The mural - painted in bright yellow and black that depicts the profile of a young man, with a band of yellow running over his eyes - takes up a portion of the wall on the busy street. But the rest of the design rounds the corner onto Rowan and extends to the Bank Street intersection. On that portion is a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Whatever you are, be a good one.”
On unpainted portions of the wall extending down 15th Street are small spots of graffiti in black that just looks like scribbles. It was that kind of graffiti that moved Smith to contact OSRS.
“We used to get some graffiti. Then we started getting bombed in the past year,” Smith said.
One day he was talking over lunch with Tim Faulkner of the Tim Faulkner Gallery and told him about the graffiti problem. Smith said Faulkner told him to hire some street artists to paint a mural and introduced Smith to the artists of OSRS, who had painted a large-scale, graffiti-inspired mural in the gallery.
The only parameters Smith gave OSRS was to “come up with something creative.” The artists jumped at the chance to work with KFI and hope the mural will generate more interest in their business.
That could happen, as Smith said a lot of people in Portland have been asking about the art work.
“It’s different than the other murals and catches your eye when you turn toward it from Main Street,” Smith said.
But it wasn’t only Faulkner’s suggestion that inspired him to consider a mural. He had seen a Bank Street building nearby, owned by the Portland Investment Initiative, painted last summer with swirling blues in an abstract design. That work, by artists Ashley Brossart and Branden McClain, features Brossart’s distinct style.
“They had an idea and ran with that,” said the initiative’s Managing Director Stephanie Kertis.
Gill Holland, who founded the Portland Investment Initiative and bought the circa-1880 building nearly 10 years ago, recently suggested it be painted after he noticed the slapdash graffiti marring its walls.
Holland noted a rise in the number of murals in the neighborhood since the four-story painting of a waterfall on the side of The Caudill Seed Company, 1531 W. Main St., went up in 2015. The Portland Investment Initiative, the Los Angeles-based non-profit Beautify Earth and My Morning Jacket sponsored the work by artist Chris Chappell, which echoed the cover of the band’s album from that year called “The Waterfall.”
The idea of promoting the painting of dynamic murals to combat graffiti, beautify urban areas and provide work for local artists isn’t new but is just now catching on in Louisville.
The Philadelphia Mural Arts program was founded more than 30 years ago and in the past several years has added Open Source, a month-long outdoor exhibit of murals, to that city’s cultural calendar.
That program has inspired others across the country, including one in Cincinnati run by a non-profit serving youth and artists called ArtWorks, which has created more than 100 public murals in 36 neighborhoods and seven nearby cities. ArtWorks’ program got a jump start after then Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory visited Philadelphia and encouraged replicating it in the Queen City.
Even Lexington has a lead on Louisville. Nearly a decade ago, the Lexington Art League began helping to sponsor mural projects throughout the city and six years ago began working with an outfit called PRHBTN to bring urban artists from around the world to the city annually for a festival and outdoor exhibit of new murals.
Even the artists of OSRS have taken part in festivals and painting events they call “jams” throughout the country. Muldoon talked about painting at Miami Art Basel in 2014 and 15 and participating in St. Louis’ big Labor Day weekend event called Paint Louis.
“You have people from all over the world at those things,” he said.
Both Muldoon and Lewis said they had hope Louisville would flourish on this front back in 2006 when artist Jared Tidwell helped get the city to make the walls on Market Street under the Interstate 65 bridge open for painters. Dubbed the Urban Experimental Art Project, the project was halted the next April. Both were in high school at the time and painted on that wall.
“We loved it and would love to have something like that in Louisville again,” Lewis said.
While there are only a few free walls, including a Park Hill storage facility and art space called The Mammoth, Louisville Visual Art has been working over the past year to bolster new programs that can get paying work for artists to make murals and provide opportunities for others to practice this art form.
Over the past year, LVA has worked with Kroger to pair artists with the grocer’s locations to create works as part of its budding Mural Art Program. Knowing that space for murals at Kroger stores is finite, Jackie Pallesen, LVA’s Director of Education & Outreach, said the organization, which has had murals commissioned for its own building in Portland, has already started writing proposals to other potential partner organizations.
“Even some other nonprofits have reached out to us, concerned about graffiti,” she said.
With more hands on board, more - as well as bigger and bolder - murals could be coming to Louisville and provide more work for artists.
That’s something the artists of OSRS are hoping.
“We want to do everything we can to get large scale jobs that have creative freedom,” Lewis said.
___
Information from: The Courier-Journal, https://www.courier-journal.com
Please read our comment policy before commenting.