The ‘stimulating and engaging’ mural effect

If Guinness World Records had a category for most murals per capita, Port Washington would be a contender. 

Ten murals covering thousands of square feet of public walls and brick buildings with hundreds of gallons of paint are splashing their colorful images on the city, and more are on the way.

This is not the result of a spontaneous uprising of artists who crave very large canvases. Rather, it’s a graphic measure of the success of a nonprofit organization called Paint on Port and allied with Port Main Street that was formed to raise funds to brighten the city with wall art.

The energy of the ongoing Paint on Port project has now radiated to Cedarburg, where an artist who was instrumental in the Port Washington mural movement organized the creation of a mural at the Lasata Senior Living Campus that has meaning well beyond its value as a vibrant image.

Artist Rodrigo Santamaria, who lent his talents to the development of the Paint on Port project, designed the Lasata mural. Besides its whimsical landscape, the charm of the artwork is that it was painted by residents of the senior campus with guidance from Santamaria.

The residents worked for about 10 hours a week for two months to complete the project. A Lasata official said the team of residents, some staff members and Santamaria bonded in an enthusiastic “community effort.”

Tom Stanton, the director of the ubiquitous good-cause supporter Mel’s Charities, was a de facto member of the team. His organization financed the project with a grant of $3,500.

Back in Port Washington, a mural in epic form is spreading across the concrete retaining wall on Jackson Street below St. Mary’s Hill and the 1860 Light Station. In a dramatic telling of the city’s history in paint, the still-in-progress mural so far depicts Native Americans, the Niagara shipwreck and stormy seas.

The artist is James Barany, a professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. When it’s finished, his mural will be 126 feet wide and more than 10 feet high.

One block to the west, another mural covers a large section of the Jackson Street retaining wall, enlivening a shady street with a brilliant fantasy of nature-themed images rendered in various media. The mural, completed last summer, is remarkable for more than its vivacious imagery. It was created by K-12 students from Port schools, led by Sherri Kultgen, who taught art at the Thomas Jefferson Middle School for 28 years.

Elsewhere in the downtown, murals appear on the sides of private commercial buildings. The standout among these is the mosaic mural on the Twisted Willow building, a fascinating amalgamation of tiles painted by many people in the community and beyond.

Other murals, by professional painters retained by Paint on Port, are colorful ornamentations, though it might be said that some are more illustration than art, and that perhaps the downtown now has enough of them. Any more might tend to turn the mural-city concept from appealing to trite.

The Lasata mural inspired the facility’s life enhancement director to produce a list of the many contributions made by the artwork to the quality of life at the institution. One was “creating a more stimulating and engaging environment.”

That is surely true there and everywhere art is present, and murals do it—literally—in a very big way.