Seattle Children's Hospital is renowned both for its extraordinary care and its artwork. Paintings, sculptures, murals, photographs, interactive displays and glass creations grace nearly every surface not devoted to patient care. The floors are pictorial mosaics, the windows feature imaginative stained glass, and the patient rooms resemble environments built for a home, not an institution. The result is a welcoming space that puts even acutely ill children and their parents at ease.
When Children's Hospital decided to build a new multi-story addition to their Sandpoint complex near the University of Washington, several artists were chosen to create the primary imagery for the walls, one artist per floor. I was selected to paint the lobby. This challenging project included three curving, two-level walls and a large pillar and semicircular space-divider punctuated by triangular windows. The walls undulated through a lobby area that connected several different environments: offices, wards, cafeteria, chapel and waiting area. The space connected to a preexisting section of the hospital with an African savanna theme, thus dictating my choice of subject matter and approach: oil on canvas.
My studio wouldn't accommodate this vast expanse. I built an annex with a12x24 foot wall big enough for each of the individual murals. I elected to paint my murals in the manner of the nineteenth century muralists and Golden Age illustrators. I built a mobile, stepped platform that allowed me to move to different parts of the paintings, and a rolling combination mahl-stick and T-square that allowed me to draw straight lines and work without touching the wet oil paint. I "squared up" my pencil drawing, overpainted in washes of acrylic, then rendered the images in oil. Once dry, I fixed the painting with several coats of clear acrylic.
In all I painted over 100 linear feet of canvas, eight to ten feet high, in about four months. My three murals depict " the arc of the day," sunrise to evening. Herbivores and carnivores are shown resting, drinking and running across the African plain.
Phase two of the hospital's expansion is currently underway and I am
continuing my mural-making adventure in a three-story atrium. This time
the theme is underwater, and the mural incorporates both oil paint and glass.
Stay tuned.
