2022 marked the 100th anniversary of the Arch Bridge, which connects my town of West Linn, OR, with Oregon City across the Willamette River, just north of Willamette Falls. I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of three artists, each representing different communities connected by the bridge, to design a collaborative mural. I was to depict the West Linn side of the bridge, alongside Cathy Rowe (the Oregon City side) and Brian Krehbiel (the waterfall in the middle, of particular significance to the Confederated Tribes).
Each artist was responsible for designing one 4 x 4′ panel that would align with the other two panels to ultimately form a cohesive 4 x 12′ image upon the panels’ completion. During the commemorative Arch Bridge Centennial Celebration Street Fair, community members of all ages were invited to help paint the panels, and then each artist had the opportunity to do some final touch-up before submitting the finished panels. The completed mural is now on display at the Oregon City Library.
As it turns out, from our selected vantage point, not much of West Linn is visible. The bridge fades into a hillside with little fanfare, quickly obscured by invasive blackberry brambles. So I opted for a more fictionalized view informed by various aspects of West Linn’s culture, past and present. The one element I knew I definitely wanted to include was the Willamette Locks, visible from the Arch Bridge but closed since 2011, that once allowed passage of large passenger and cargo ships over the Willamette Falls. The paper mill is another prominent part of the landscape, both physically and in terms of the town’s history. Some of the other details I included were the historic MacLean House, which does indeed sit along the river, just slightly north, and the West Linn Public Library, which in many ways serves as a cultural hub of the town. I finished off my planning sketches with a couple more playful details.
To ensure the actual painting of the mural would be manageable as a 4-hour community activity, I took a mosaic approach, tiling the final sketch into approximately 2-inch “tiles” that people could paint as many or as few of as they wanted. The tiling was relatively straightforward: I had developed my sketch in Inkscape, and was able to use one of its filters to fracture the image at the desired scale. I then projected the final image onto the mural panel, tracing the outlines onto the primed surface.
Once the linework was complete, it was time to figure out which colors would go where. I figured specifying a color for every single area would be painfully tedious, both for me and for the community members doing the painting. I wanted to give participants enough guidance so that it wasn’t overly intimidating for anyone, yet enough leeway to encourage their own creativity. So, instead, I relied on the four color theorem, mixing four colors for each area, and just instructing people to try to avoid having two tiles of the same color touch. My sister and mom joined me for a pre-painting party, where we laid down some of the background colors and began filling in bits of the mosaic sections to give people a better vision of what we were creating.
After the event, once the community had painted in all the areas and the mural was formally displayed as a whole, each artist was sent home with our panels to complete any final details or clean-up work. I added the lettering to the library and paper mill, revisited the “all the colors got mixed into one” areas, and finished up with a bit of tighter linework to emphasize some of the details.
This project was an amazing experience. Tackling the largest work I’ve ever done, toiling alone in my garage, transferring an image from a laptop screen to a 4×4’ surface, collaborating with the other artists, getting featured on the local news, painting alongside participants of all ages… it really allowed for an amazing range of experiences. And to top it all off, I continue to be in awe of how well all three panels work together as a cohesive whole. We each designed our sections and engaged the public in different ways, and yet each panel works so well alongside the other two.
