We make Frida Kahlo look like a children’s facepainter

Now that that article has your attention, my name is Nathaniel and I am a lot of things. I want more opportunities to explore my art and entrepreneurship in the future. I have been spending the last year working with Kimball Jenkins through an artist-in-residence program with Waypoint. It’s been a lot of things. I was able to previously publish an article about Yu-Gi-Oh which was pretty cool. We have just finished a massive 60-foot-across mural and this is an article about the project.

OK, let me be fully transparent. I have a habit of being hella opaque. My mentor, Yasamin Safarzadeh, put me through a wringer of rewrites on this article. I’m currently on the second rewrite of the second draft, so I’m going to serve you up the facts a little cleaner this time. And already I haven’t said what I’m even talking about, so let me stop waffling around before I have to do this a fourth time.

Myself and a group of other artists from the Manchester Waypoint Youth Resource Center endeavored on a little mural behind the eponymous Waypoint building. 298 Hanover Street, to be exact.

Now, one of the reasons I had to rewrite this thing is because sometimes I like to stare wistfully out a window with my tobacco pipe in one hand and my writing utensil in the other. The first side effect of this picture is the delusion that I’m Hemingway, the other is the delusion that I have his straightforwardness. I don’t. I interviewed some people during the project, so I’ll just tell you what they said and interject occasionally until the picture is clear.

V was a person who was new to the area when we started, arriving right around the time we were handing out our punch cards.

Now the punch card system was an incentive to people with the lowest barrier to entry to work on the mural. You get 10 punches, you get some money, that sort of thing. V instantly dismissed the prospect of money saying, and I quote:

“I don’t need a punch card, I don’t wanna get paid I just wanna help out.”

Now, those are the types of people you want involved in the city-wide beautification of your city, am I wrong? For the love of the paintbrush and nothing more, maybe to be helpful and appreciated. Those were the soldiers, bonded in brush. They get to work, be seen, or maybe just vape and pretend to be busy. As a great man once said:” its gives them something to do.”  The mural was mostly to help them feel some sort of way and I think it did that and then some. I asked V a brief follow-up,

“What do you think of the mural so far”

And she responded, very Hemingwayesque, “It’s fun.”

I think most people enjoyed it. Echoing the sentiment, and quoting another person from the unveiling event this past weekend, “It’s the most fun I’ve had doing unfun things.”

He was talking about the ladders we’d have to set up or the many spilled paint cans we’d tidied over the past two months. It went by pretty fast, all things considered. I mean the painting didn’t take that long, but coordinating funding, grant writing, planning, drafting, designing, getting city approval, priming, painting, sealing, unveiling reception coordinating, getting more funding and all in that order? Every day for two months sounds about right.

Matter of fact, we painted all sorts of things besides the wall. From longboards to lunchboxes we misused the paint on all sorts of little things. JJ, a participant, said of the baseball bat he was painting while waiting for a swath he had just rolled on the wall to dry, “ Look at how sick that thinger is right up in ‘yunder. It looks like a galaxy drippin’ down off a dat der’ handhold.”

He had just finished laying a white base for what would later become a cartoon-looking fella by the time we had finished and, like plenty of people, was fiending to paint. I, myself, painted my longboard red. I didn’t like the design on the underbelly of the board, or any designs for that matter, so I covered it with the closest color (which happened to be red) while my accent paint was drying on the wall.

We had fun. It’s a mural, you know? It’s art. The only thing we’re supposed to be serious about is finishing it. We finished it. Now, if the TV breaks or our phones die we have something to look at. I jest, but seriously everyone probably got plenty of mileage outta that mural. We had dropouts dropping in to paint, and we had droplets of paint under our nails for weeks. I don’t know about blood … or sweat … or tears … but a whole lotta something went into that mural. One volunteer, Mickey, said, “I’m just happy to paint.” And paint he did. If most of the painters on the project weren’t happy to paint, then they’d make better actors than painters. I’ll leave it at that, I think that was Hemingway who said that.

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