Day 5: Finishing up!

For me, completing a project is always the most stressful part: there are final decisions to be made: how to tie it all together, what details to enhance and which to subdue, and where to apply my perfectionist tendencies, and where to let go. This is especially true in a situation like a short-term international residency, where I won't be able to come back to the mural on my own for repeated tweaking sessions. One thing I realized I would have to let go of with this project, for example, is having completely uniform, flat color throughout the background ("present Krasnoyarsk") sections...the quality of the paint we could find in Krasnoyarsk was such that overnight the pigment might change slightly and result in a slightly different color being applied to the wall...and there was also the issue with having to buy a different type of "acrylic" base to mix more blue river paint because the store had no more of the original substance. Normally I am extremely picky about matching background color if a new batch needs to be mixed, but in this situation, striving for this was turning out to be more frustrating that it was worth--so I settled on simply trying to make the slight color variance as un-obvious as possible.

Saturday afternoon's mural session was probably the most stressful for all the above reasons, especially since the mural was at a stage where the work that remained to be done was mostly more skilled work like touching up outlines and edges, finishing the individual futuristic graffiti murals near the top of the wall, adding detail to the large book, and writing in words and titles. Doing a mural is always a challenge of multi-tasking: keeping an eye on the big picture while supervising and assigning individual tasks based on participants' skill levels, and especially at this late stage, trying to finish the sections that I need to paint or finesse as the supervising artist while making sure everyone else's time is used productively. There are always interruptions, often in the form of questions or requests to change or add something, and a process of figuring out what will look best, but also what we have the time to do!I n some cases it is actually a challenge to have too many people there who all want to help, when all the fool-proof tasks like painting large areas of color are done. (Eventually the teachers gave some young students from the school who had just arrived that day wanting to help their own little project, painting a square pole inside the office, which turned out beautifully!)

I was initially unsure about some of the final decisions discussed by the participants, such as adding titles and dates to the stenciled buildings. I kind of liked their air of mystery and simplicity when title-less--I always hesitate to just give away too much information in an artwork. But the strong feeling at the school was that the buildings need to be identified so viewers know their meaning and, in the case of the no longer extant Krasnoyarsk buildings, when they became obsolete. The school's art teacher, Irina Alexandra, could also write the titles very precisely in beautiful Russian calligraphy. The participants wanted me to write the titles on the two NYC buildings in a similar style. I soon realized that naming the buildings would be a good move, and by having the titles in the two languages, they would still remain mysterious: e.g., for an English-speaking viewer like me, the Russian building titles would beg to be googled and translated, and I imagine the Russian students who see the mural on a daily basis could have a similar response to the English NYC titles. For this reason, when we discussed what should go in the book itself, I immediately thought this would be an appropriate place for the title and participants' names, and that they should be in English on one side, and Russian on the other. We also chose a deep red color for the book cover based on the symbol of the school, which has a book bearing the symbolic chapel of Krasnoyarsk with a sun behind it. The school director wanted the school symbol represented in some way in the mural, and while the participants did not want to show it literally, the red book with a yellow sun shape behind it creates a subtle reference that also alludes to the role of this school and learning in general (about the past, about other parts of the world, etc.) in an ideal Krasnoyarsk.

The mural group also had wanted from the beginning to put fish swimming in the river, and the graffiti words "Ideal City" in a strategic place. We encountered a slight problem when the student, Nastya, who had originally planned to paint the fish, called in sick. This turned out to be a positive development in that it created a whole new project for about 5 students, as they got to work sketching and painting new fish. I left the design up to them but was pretty insistent that the fish and letters in the river should be pretty subtle--not too big and only in tones of blue, and like the futuristic background, should avoid too much black or white (stencil colors)--it was important to me to maintain a clear separation via color and style between the different sections of the mural. I also thought it would be fun to bring out the heating duct covers by confining the fish to that area, and confining the graffiti letters to the opposite wall.

One suggestion I decided to shoot down was outlining all the main skyline buildings to bring them out more. This was partly a practical decision--it was something I was on the fence about initially, and if we'd had a few more days, I might have slept on it to see the mural with fresh eyes, or experimented with drawing outlines into a photograph of the mural using photoshop first...but given that it was already late at night when this suggestion was made and there were still many other things to finish, I decided to make a more theoretical design decision that the lack of outlining set the "present krasnoyarsk" apart conceptually from the other parts of the mural that are so detailed with so much outlining. I think we all wound up feeling at peace with this decision.

By the last few hours, I was feeling the adrenaline rush of being almost done, and that amazing feeling I seem to only get from hands-on art projects, where I completely lose track of time and it no longer matters. I just knew that all the other artists seemed to share this drive to get the project done that night, and the teachers weren't kicking anyone out. When I finally finished writing all the names on the mural and we left for the day, I think it was around 11:15 pm...we'd been there since about 2 or 2:30. The students had all agreed that the next afternoon, Sunday, at 2pm would be the best time for the presentation ceremony. I wasn't sure exactly what this would entail, but I was looking forward to finding out!