I am beginning to insert figures into the mural.  I had thought I would not but by popular demand, and I admit to better integrate the four panels of which the first is replete with figures, the insertion is appropriate both aesthetically and thematically.  It is tentative so far, but here is a bit of what I am doing in charcoal at this point on top of the existing color fields.

I spent most of the day up and down scaffolding.  Come to think of it, that is about all I have been doing for nine days.  Today I worked on the top level of panels #3 and #4 most of the afternoon and a bit of high work on panel #2 in the evening.  The panels are, I think, talking to one another, thought there are some areas that don't feel quite right yet.

Tomorrow night is the painting show opening.  The mural inauguration will be on the 3rd of July.  Some dancers and musicians will do improvisational work in front of the murals.  Jorge Acevedo, a dear old friend and founder of the school, will play indigenous flute.  The acoustics are wonderful in the space and so I expect it will be quite nice.

Here are a few shots from today's work.  These shots were taken before an area on panel four was modified and a relatively light upper section of panel two was glazed with a blue green to better make a transition optically with the rest.  These are just iPhone shots.  I will document the project with the Nikon a bit later.  I may have the scaffolding removed in a few days so that I can see the work a bit better now that the upper third is about finished.  I can reach the rest with an extension ladder or a low platform.

View of the gallery and the mural in close proximity. 

Click to see an enlargement

Still working on the alignments and the general composition.  

The fourth panel is the least finished.

The mural site as of the evening of June 19th. 

State of the murals as of the morning of June 19

A side show of paintings

Along side, literally, the mural site, in a gallery of the School of the Integrated Arts, I am showing work executed in Spain last summer.  The body of work is called La Tramontana Temporal in reference to winds that blow across the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean Sea.  

This body of work is largely inspired by a sustained residency in Catalonia, Spain.  In it, I sought to work with forms that convey something of the refined and constructed landscape as well as the beautiful natural environment in the context of the depth and drama of the tumultuous and enduring cultural and political history in that part of the world.  More specifically, I was inspired by a particularly massive 10th Century masía stone rural farmhouse in which my wife and I lived and worked, once the home of a famous Almogaver mercenary leader and feudal lord of the region.  I was also inspired by the architecturally varied forms of the finestra (window) as well as the bridges (pont), both intact and in ruin, some from Roman times, others from the Spanish Civil War, some as a result of military attempts to isolate mountain populations, some simply the residue of time. I was also inspired by gracious Catalán rural customs, such as the planting of cypress trees to signify hospitality, and finally the Tramontana winds blowing across northern Catalonia, downward from the Pyrenees to the Costa Brava of the Mediterranean, all metaphors to me of natural and transcultural changes, passageways, transitional spaces alluding to the stubbornness of life and yet its never ending delicacy and wonder.

Here is a pdf of the bi-fold brochure (in Spanish): 

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First layer on the fourth panel today.

It felt a bit high, but I got it done.  I am sure I will be up there a lot more in the coming days as the imagery is refined and layered further.

Still working on the alignments between panels...it is a bit more tricky than I expected.

Playing with alignments is a challenge.  

I am up and down the scaffolding dozens of times in a session seeking to 

fine tune the passage of lines of force, shapes and contours as they pass visually 

from one panel to the next. 

The work continues.   Today I hope to finish grounding the fourth panel to the left and continue developing more detailed fields of forms on second, third and fourth. 

This post marks the beginning of the second and final phase of this mural cycle started almost three years ago.  Of the four panels, two are left to paint and the first are in need of some adjustment to improve the overall composition.  I have spent the several days working with the 2nd panel and have painted the ground on the third and a bit of the fourth.  More layers are go come but I have a sense of the whole now for the first time.

Showing the state of the murals in early June, 2013.

Status after the first week of work.

Though I wrote an artist statement I stand behind for the tall panel, I am now thinking a bit differently about how I want to approach the three shorter panels.  Here is a draft of a statement I wrote today:

Three of the 10,000 Graces

Completing Orígines; una alegoría de transformatión creativa

By Ronald Mills de Pinyas

In 2010 I painted Orígines; una alegoría de transformatión creativa, the tallest panel in this cycle of murals.  In it I sought to show the simultaneity of the arts in the psychological and spiritual formation of the individual as it is hopefully transmitted from generation to generation.  

Now, in 2013 to finish the cycle is it perhaps appropriate that I have chosen to extend the mural cycle in a slightly new way, one less illustrative and perhaps a bit more open to the movement of abstract thought.  The ambitious challenge inherent in the title of this art school, one of integration, implies that various forms of art have a principle of underlying unity.  Further, that this unity can be made manifest by multi-talented individuals as such despite the obvious technical issues fundamental to the successful practice of any given art form.  This is a very philosophical notion not far from that at the heart of the school of my own early artistic formation, the School of Creative Studies of the University of California, Santa Barbara.  

As I have worked these last few weeks I have contemplated the bounty of spirit inherent in this place, of the latency, the enthusiasm, the goodwill, and the ways in which spirit becomes sensation, manifested as music, in how music is transmuted into corporeal movement as dance, in how characters of life are vivified through improvisation in the theater of life, and of course in how vision and mind is explored and amplified through the plastic arts.   

The final three panels are therefore not intended to illustrate the separate arts, as I envisioned three years ago but rather to suggest the complexity, flow and turbulence of spirit at the root of the arts.  That the viewer may imagine they see bodies in motion or notes and shapes as sounds, the truth is that as a painter I would rather plant suggestions than define a narrative or image, per se, leaving the interpretation open to those who need only a nudge to see things the painter could not have imagined.  In this I honor what I take to be a working principle as an artist, that this unifying spirit of art, the one that invites integration, is not owned or mastered, it it borrowed and inhabited from time to time; that contact with it is the most intimate experience possible and at the same time the most public and transpersonal. 

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As an add-on, I am considering painting a floor to ceiling panel in the dance studio that overlooks the murals.  (Grey panel with the poster shown below)

Dancers in front of the panel I hope to paint.