How to Paint a Mural in Your Basement

William Newman, as told to Casey Smith

When I started as a full-time art student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, I was still really influenced by my pre-med science courses, especially the images and anatomical photographs and drawings in the textbooks and medical magazines. Joe Sheppard, a painter’s painter and one of the Baltimore realists, taught me the magic of the Maroger medium, in a black-and-white underpainting, then how to glaze the color on top. I started to get into painting blood, guts, and dissected body parts. This became my first body of work, just blood and guts as beautiful as I could make them.

I met a lot of artists in my job managing the art supply store at the Corcoran School of Art in 1971. We were all mainly figurative artists rather than Color School abstract minimalists, and we formed a group called the Washington Color Pencil School. The name came from the title of our group show at the Corcoran in 1973, kind of a tongue-in-cheek response to the Color School. There were four other members of the Washington Color Pencil School: Carmen Almon, Isabella LeClair, Bill Lombardo, and Lisa Brotman. Rockne Krebs was an honorary member.

My first painting from graduate school, Holy Writ, 1973, was about the end of the world. It’s a funny painting, full of little details like my face painted as the face of a fat little doll. It’s really strange that I would do a painting of flies sucking the brains out of babies. That’s the part I don’t get because I had a child. And then I’ve got a little baby’s hand tied with a piece of string to one of the fly’s feet, and the fly’s gotten pissed and bit the top off one of the baby’s little fingers. And so for about ten years, any time I did a piece of art that was evil, I would put that hand in, with part of the little finger bitten off. I never cared if people were disturbed by these images. I was painting exactly the way I wanted to paint.

I was getting ideas and images from everywhere, from medical magazines, from advertising, from dreams, and from other paintings. I felt that any image I liked I could appropriate. I figure anything I see is mine to use, because it resides in my vision, my memory, and my dreams. I’ll take it and transform it into something better.

In the summer of 1975, when I first got to the Corcoran as a full-time instructor, I took on a project to decorate a construction site on 17th Street across from the Old Executive Office Building. I rounded up about twenty students, and we painted thirty-five or forty big magnified insects and animals, cut them out of plywood, and put them up around the building site. They looked perfect. A couple of weeks before we finished the job, I asked the General Services Administration people, “What if I do a painting for the inside, you know, a large nude for the workers?” They thought it was a great idea. So I did it. I painted a reclining woman, smiling and nude, twenty-four feet long head to toe. The GSA people came down to the Corcoran the day before it was supposed to go up, took one look at it, and said, “No way.”  They compromised and said they would let me put it up if I painted a bathing suit on it in international orange, the safety color. At the time I was just thinking, great, I’ll paint a bathing suit on it, but that bathing suit is coming off as soon as it rains. I mixed tempera paint with that famous Corcoran bathroom soap, and I knew it would wash off right away. I told Paul Richard, the art writer at the Washington Post, about it, and he wrote a story titled “Uncle Sam’s Pinup/Praying for Rain.” The painting came to be called Lady Sarah, named after its model. It drizzled the first night, a little bit of it started to drip, and an army of photographers from the national and international press corps camped out at the site.  In the morning a line formed to look through a peephole. At one point the line was about three hundred people long. It was complete lunacy.

I knew they were going to make me take it down before the bathing suit washed off. The National Organization for Women hated it and was vocal in its opposition.

It was written up in Time magazine and became a big deal. After Lady Sarah was forced down, I cleaned it, repainted the bathing suit, and gave it to the Corcoran School to raise money. Art Buchwald was the auctioneer; he gave a hilarious speech. Sarah suddenly became a kind of minor celebrity.  We went to Chicago to do a feature for Playboy; this time I painted directly on her body. Even though NOW despised me, the League of Women Voters didn’t object. They asked to borrow Lady Sarah to have on stage for the televised presidential debates between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

In 1984, the D.C. government had a  construction wall that needed artistic help across from the Federal Trade Commission building near the corner of 7th and E streets, and they put out an open call to the art community to come one Saturday and paint murals. Tom Green had the space on one side of me, and Steve Kurvant was on the other. My design was already drawn on paper, so we just had to transfer it to the wall and paint it. It was a picture of Ronald Reagan’s face looking up in the sky. Earlier that summer he had inadvertently said during his weekly radio address, “I’m going to blow up Russia in five minutes.” Apparently he didn’t know that he was broadcasting live when he said it. The mural had captions on the top and bottom that simply said, “5 minutes” (fig. 4). The former Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, later remarked that Reagan’s little joke caused Yuri Andropov to launch the largest peacetime intelligence operation in Soviet history. The Monday morning after we painted it, Diana McClellan put a little picture of the Reagan mural in the Washington Times, with a witty remark about it bothering someone down the street. The next day a friend called and told me that somebody had brought furniture and cardboard boxes out from the Federal Trade Commission building and piled them in front of our Reagan mural (fig. 20). I hadn’t taken a picture of it yet, so I came down and moved the office furniture to the side and took pictures.  I was greeted by a top official from the Federal Trade Commission who said that he and his co-workers liked the portrait, but, as he pointed toward the White House, “they didn’t.” The next day the furniture was gone, but the mural was papered over. We easily removed the paper, to the applause of the Federal Trade Commission workers. The following day I got a call from the same friend, who told me that a large flatbed Army truck with a crew of uniformed soldiers was dismantling the wall. We were unable to find the whereabouts of the mural or who actually gave the order to have it taken down. McClellan wrote that it “vanished into an Orwellian memory hole.” The 1984 presidential election was coming up, and it was only fitting that the New Art Examiner put the painting on the cover of the November edition.

About this time I painted Searching for New Colors (pl. 9), dedicated to the memory of my friend Gene Davis. The scene depicts a glass-bottomed boat sailing into a paradise of bright sky. The five figures in the boat are all artists: Gene Davis (one of Washington’s best-known and most successful painters), Arshile Gorky (Gene’s favorite artist), James Huckenpahler, James Whitelaw, and me at the bow. I drew Gene with the same caricature profile that he used himself in his own self-portraits. We are looking down through little panes of glass; the colors separate perfectly, each pane its own shade of blue, green, magenta, and heliotrope. Gene might be smiling or grimacing; it’s hard to tell.

I was in love with drawing and painting, working in my studio, teaching at the Corcoran, and getting out to do public murals if I could find any good ones. With the murals, it is more like taking advantage of the situation at hand, a chance to do a public thing, and it is always fun. I don’t have to sit in my studio. I lose the confinement and solitude. I can work fast, just do the best I can in a given amount of time, two, three, or four weeks, and then we’re out of there.

When I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1979, it didn’t affect me much. I didn’t know anything about MS and I wasn’t feeling many of the symptoms. It affected my eyesight first. I went blind in my left eye and then was color-blind for about a year in both eyes. I saw everything blue, kind of like the blue light of a television with faint little splashes of color, very different, very memorable. The paintings at this time became what I call my “Blue Dream” series. I still paint “Blue Dream” paintings; I  try to make it a point to include at least one each time I do a series. My next group of paintings was held together by the theme of roses, and one of them was blue. My mother was dying. The show was called “For the Roses”; it was really for my mother, she loved roses.

The computer made new things possible. It marked an advance over the technique of projection based on mirrors and lenses, the kind of projection that Vermeer used. It’s a technique that I still need sometimes. Before the computer, you had to transfer an image directly to canvas; now you had a way to alter the image, to stretch it, distort it, change its scale, and transfer it in printed ink. The computer took another step. In 1987 James Huckenpahler and I made a thirty-foot-long Cheshire cat, its face stretched wide. We put it up on a wall on 7th Street downtown, another construction site that the D.C. government wanted artistically enhanced. When seen in one exact spot, the smiling cat was there perfectly, but from every other angle it was just this crazy abstract landscape. Allen Weiss, a cinema studies professor from New York University, was in Washington at a conference hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery on “Cinema Studies, Artistic Practice, and Art History.” He wrote to me, “Much to my pleasure while strolling around the city in my free time I chanced upon a computer-generated image—in full anamorphic splendor—of your Cheshire Cat!” We began to correspond; he published an essay in Art & Text shortly thereafter titled “Anamorphosis Absconditus.”

I recently finished another mural project, a sweeping forty-foot-long anamorphic mural for NASA, called The NASA Space Mural/Hubba Bubba. During the last two weeks of 2001, together with a group of eighteen painters, a photographer, and my longtime assistant and collaborator, Brigitte Reyes, we worked on it every day.  The organization of labor on my mural projects is kind of like a medieval artists’ guild; masters and apprentices work together toward a common purpose. We didn't have much time, so we had to work fast, layer upon layer, sometimes two a day. Using many lamps for drying maybe gave us an extra day. I wanted to see how spectacular the digital images from the Hubble telescope would look painted in oil on a ten by forty foot wooden panel. It is a fantastic painting, finished in just fourteen days!

Casey Smith is an adjunct professor of writing and literary studies at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.