If you follow my social media or receive my emails, you might have noticed that at the beginning of March I started a mural at the Leif Erikson Park in San Jose. It’s quite a large mural, on a bike locker box that’s 46 inches tall by 76 inches long and 40 inches wide, so 10,692 square inches, or 891 square feet. It’s been a long process but it’s finally completed and I’m thrilled with the outcome. It’s a celebration of native California plants, flowers and pollinators. and includes sunflowers, California fuchsia, milkweed, manzanita, blue-eyed grass, California poppies, heuchera, California pipevine, bees & bumblebees, and butterflies: monarch & caterpillars, western giant swallowtail, pipevine swallowtail.

In the beginning, I posted progress photos on Facebook and Instagram, and was making great headway. I started by ordering different colors of outdoor latex paint and learning to mix all of the colors I would need. I quickly learned that painting with latex is not at all like painting with acrylic artists paints. I tested with warm red, blue and yellow and cool red, blue and yellow paints, choosing paints with a high level of pigment.

After I’d built some confidence that I could mix all of the colors I’d need, the next step was to create a study. I could use this as a reference image to show to the neighborhood association for their approval and that I could use while painting to stay on track.

With color mixing solved and a simple study created, I started on the mural and made rapid progress in the beginning. Then it started raining, rain that we very much needed here in our drought-prone area, but that caused some delay. Just when I thought I could get back to work, the coronavirus pandemic started escalating. Our first lockdown in Santa Clara County started in late-March. My progress came to a sudden and immediate halt. City parks were off limits and stayed off limits. People were allowed to walk or run through parks, but not to hang out there.

Restrictions started to loosen up in June and July and so I went back to the mural and was disappointed to find that in some spots, the primer wasn’t adhering to the box completely. There were bubbles. That started a 2-month process of trying to strip paint off, then waiting a week or two to see how the mural was holding up. Did more stripping need to be done? Ultimately, after consulting with the neighborhood contact person, we decided that we’d only strip the top where the problem appeared.

I was finally able to start work on the mural again in early October and buckled down to get it done as quickly as possible. Within two weeks of starting back up, I had the mural completed. Yay! As I said at the beginning of this post, I’m really happy with the result and hope it will bring joy to the neighborhood for many years.

Location: Leif Erikson Park, 4961 Oyster Bay Dr., San Jose, CA 95136

The mural was sponsored by the ArtBox Project SJ in conjunction with Phantom Galleries and the Lief Erikson Neighborhood Association.

Here are some close-ups of the flowers and pollinators: