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May 08, 2009

Working on the Mural

The following is a dispatch from Robbi, who early this morning completed her second full day (and first full night) of working on painting the Literary House mural. She worked from 10:00am on Thursday to 6:00am this morning and still had the fortitude to send these photos and commentary for me to post. With much respect and without further ado:

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I laid out the mural in a page layout program in my computer so that I could print the entire thing out and transfer it directly onto the Lit House wall by using transfer paper (kind of like the old carbon copy paper). I also printed out a mini version/schematic to use as a reference, along with a list of things to remember. Here they are.

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The schematic, alas, is incomplete, since I lost the two side walls somewhere between home and the Lit House. There were very important notes on those side walls.

The life-sized mural printed out as panels on a grid, and we had to hang them as such. Everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle (except without the little odd-shaped knobbies to let you know that things actually fit properly together). So it took a lot of jiggering and shifting to make things fit. We had, on the previous day, made our first attempt at hanging this grid, but were aghast to find that Kevin Bacon was not where we thought he was supposed to be. He was, in fact, on the opposite wall. I thought I was going to have to totally rework the schematic (again! horrors!) until Joe pointed out that I had just mislabeled the print shop door and the library door and had gotten them reversed. Whoo Nellie. Was that good news. So, anyway. We started with Kevin Bacon and worked our way out.

Note from Matthew: (You may wonder why Kevin Bacon is included in a mural of literary greats. The mural takes its cue from the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and is a satirical take on what might happen if we treated our literary stars in the same manner as we do the stars of the screen. Hence the mural is titled Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, but we felt Kevin deserved to make an appearance. After all, who else would engage in an all-night dance off with the Marquis de Sade?)

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The hanging continued across the ceiling.

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Things got substantially more complicated once we started across the ceiling. Those crossbeams, for one. The humidity in the air, for two, and the general lack of stickiness in the tape, for three. Things were saggy and sad-looking, but I did not despair.

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While I was not despairing at that end of the room, I got Erica and Owen to start hanging paper on the other end of the room. This would prove to be a fatal mistake, but at the time I thought to myself, "There are all these people here who want to be put to work. I must find something useful for them to do. Even if it means that later on, we'll have to move everything, because when the two sides meet in the middle, there will be a 6-inch overlap." Ah well.

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Owen and Joe starting to plaster another wall. These tiles were assembled first on the floor by Nick, then taped up en masse. It was a nice idea, and worked pretty well since we had a lot of hands. This idea, unfortunately, only worked on the walls. Once we started having to deal with gravity and crooked beams and lumpy plaster, it was a lost cause. Tile by tile it was.

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This helpful student started to transfer the linework in a very tedious fashion (not her that's at fault for the tedium - the procedure itself is what's tedious). Later, on my own, and in a more practical state of mind, I discovered just how tedious this method was, and made some adjustments. I just feel sorry that this poor soul had to suffer through the tedious way. Boo hoo.

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Caroline also suffered through the tedious way. The tedious way is to lift each panel, getting it unstuck from the wall/ceiling, slide a piece of transfer paper underneath, then carefully trace the lines with a pencil, which transfers the line to the wall. What I ended up doing was tracing just the outline of the portrait and then using a ruler to place and draw the lines between them. I still have to go back and transfer the words, but there won't be that pathetic wobbliness to the lines that happens when you're craning your neck trying to draw upside-down and opposite-handed.

Nick observed the tedium, and decided that he had made a good decision by remaining on the floor.

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Even Joshua Wolf Shenk, fearless Literary House director helped out. You see, I even trusted him with advanced-level taping technique - the level that involves working around the track for the track lighting.

Actually, I'm telling a bit of a lie. About two seconds after I took this picture, I made him come down so I could work around the track. It was a pain in the ass.

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It's hard to see, but at this point the left wall had been all transferred, and the ceiling was close to being all plastered.

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This photo shows the state of things at the end of the day on Wednesday. We left the room a complete disaster. We were afraid to throw away any pieces in case we needed them, so the floor just got to be a big pile of paper and tape. Whenever you walked around, you would get a piece of tape stuck to your foot, that would then collect paper, and more tape, and pretty soon you're walking around in a big ball of trash. That got all trampled and torn, but we still didn't want to throw anything away. Since printing this thing out takes a long time, and there's no way I can tell it just to print out one part of the mural (without some recropping etc of the file), I just didn't want to risk it.

This is the sign we left overnight.

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Painting started happening on Thursday morning. I was still drawing lines and transferring stuff on the ceiling, but because of all of the shifting that had occurred (and because I hadn't really accounted for the track lights) I sort of had to make adjustments as I went along, which basically meant I was the only one who could be working on it at the time. So I had the students start doing paint-by-numbers on the portraits. Here is Mike painting in Poe. He had to leave early to attend a crab-fest, which was a particularly dirty insult to the rest of us.

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Our friend Emily Kalwaitis (who is a real-live painter) came to help.

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And mom and dad brought sushi!

It was SOOOOO yummy. I took a picture to make you jealous. You can see the paint-by-number cutouts in the background. The idea is the painters take the cutouts, transfer the interior detail, and paint in the blocks of color. Then I'll go back and do all the linework myself.

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Caroline a careful and exacting painter. And she loves Edith. So she got to paint her. I was trying to figure out why our paint was so runny and not opaque. I guess because it's house paint. I forgot that we weren't going to be covering huge areas of color. I could have bought artists acrylics. We did end up replacing a couple colors, but some of the house paints look fine.

Note from Matthew: Edith Wharton the cat is the long-time Literary House mascot. Given her literary name and her central place in Lit House culture, it seemed appropriate to include her among the towering greats of the canon. The other, less beloved (to the Literary House community, anyway) Edith Wharton also appears.

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Caroline had to finish Poe because of Mike leaving us for his stinking crab fest.

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The portrait painting continued at the far end of the room.

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As the day wore on, people started disappearing. Caroline and I were the only ones there from about dinnertime to midnight. She amazed me by painting with one hand and eating a popsicle with the other. Upside-down, no less, because it was a really awkward corner she was in.

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This is how the room looked at 4:00 this morning. After Caroline left, I finished transferring all the lines and circles so that people could keep painting in various portraits the next day, while I transferred the writing. I decided it was time to clean up, so I would know which bits of text we needed to keep and how much of the rest we could recycle.

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Iggy insisted on helping.

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She barked at the cleaning lady like a maniac when she came in a little after 4.

This is how the room looked when I left. Still a lot to do, but we're coming along.

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I'm so tired, I have to go to bed now. I'm going to try to get back there for another long day tomorrow. It's gotten light out in the time that I've written this.

Good night.

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I edited out the mushy stuff, which was mostly directed at Alden, anyway.

I'll post more photos as the work continues. If you happen to see Robbi sleeping on a sidewalk or slumped over her shopping cart in the grocery store, please give her a helpful nudge and a compassionate pat on the shoulder. These are the sorts of responsibilities that would fall to me, were I in Chestertown this week.

Posted by bogenamp at May 8, 2009 08:28 AM