FREEWAY LADY RESTORATION NEAR COMPLETION:
AN ACCOUNT FROM THE FIELD
by Art Mortimer
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On Saturday, January 23rd, and again on Saturday, April 25th, muralist Kent Twitchell, art conservator Nathan Zakheim, and a group of Kent’s friends and MCLA volunteers, including myself, descended on the Prince Hotel just off the Hollywood Freeway near downtown L.A. We were there to start the restoration process on what was arguably the most famous mural in Los Angeles until it was unceremoniously painted over by the building’s owner back in 1986. Armed with heat guns, spatulas, ladders and extension cords, we began the laborious process of removing the overlay of white paint and lovingly bringing the “Freeway Lady” back to life. Nathan Zakheim and Kent had already made two earlier attempts at removing the covering--uncovering the eyes the first time, and the nose and mouth the second time. What they had discovered in their first session several years ago was that, although the white covering resisted most chemical means of softening and removing it, because Kent had coated the mural with a layer of clear acrylic medium when he finished it, it was possible to use heat guns to soften and lift off the overlaying applications of paint. This was happening apparently because the clear acrylic medium melts at a lower temperature than the underlying pigmented acrylic paint; thus this clear layer softens and melts before the mural paint underneath has a chance to melt. |
| The volunteers soon found out that it requires a practiced hand with a heat gun and deft handling of a pair of spatulas to lift off the paint in any sizable amounts without damaging the mural. Also, the mural paint underneath was definitely fragile and thin in places, so although we were able to remove a lot of the overlying white, in places it was stuck too solidly to remove, and in other places it brought pieces of the mural away with it. Graffiti that had been on top of the mural before it was whitewashed was also encountered, and it proved resistant to heat. However the graffiti did yield, for the most part, to Nathan’s expert applications of a variety of anti-graffiti products and solvents after the heat gun and spatula teams had cleaned off an area as best they could. We found through trial and error that we were only able to peel off the white paint effectively in areas where the white paint overlay was thick enough to make a strong film that could be grabbed and pulled with spatulas without breaking or tearing—much like peeling off dead skin in sheets after a bad sunburn. As most of us know, a mild sunburn produces a layer of skin too thin to peel effectively; it is thin and weak and tears too easily to pull off large sections. A bad sunburn can make for some real substantial peeling, coming off in big sheets much to the delight of whoever is doing the peeling. |
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This was much what we found on the mural: in some areas, peeling went rather quickly and efficiently, while in other areas it was laborious and very slow. We also found that the white paint was really only thick enough to peel across the bottom half of the mural. Apparently the whitewashed wall became a target for taggers and had been repainted many times up to about the 7- or 8-foot level. Above that height, the white paint layer was too thin to allow peeling to work. Ever resourceful, the artist, conservator and volunteers put their heads together to figure out ways to move ahead in spite of these obstacles. It |
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| was decided we were not going to try to peel over the background areas of the mural. Since these areas were originally just solid black, Kent decided just to paint fresh black acrylic paint on top of the existing white. Also, it was decided just to peel as much as could be readily peeled in the first session; we would rethink our strategy for difficult areas after taking some time to assess and evaluate our experiences of this day. In areas where the white paint was too thin, we decided to add additional layers of white paint to build it up and make it thick enough to be peeled. One or two of these layers were added to various sections during this session, others at later dates. Kent also decided that he would paint a new moon image in his studio and glue it on top of the old one, since the old one was badly damaged by graffiti. He said he had recently found his original cartoon of the moon and that it would be a simple matter to make a new one. The two areas that had been cleaned off previously--the eyes in the first session, and the nose and mouth in the second--had been recovered with white paint after they were cleaned off, so they had to be cleaned again. This single layer of white paint over these areas was too thin to allow peeling, so Nathan attacked it with his arsenal of cleaners and solvents. The eyes had been painted over again by the building owner without any intervening layer of clear acrylic to protect them, so it was very difficult to get paint off this area. Nathan and MCLA volunteer Jim Kenney were fairly successful, however; the eyes can once again be seen, but they are partially under a film of white paint that could not be completely removed. But the nose and mouth had been given a coat of Soluvar, a clear solvent-based acrylic coating, before they were painted out again, and this allowed the white paint to be cleaned off fairly readily under Nathan’s persistent applications of just the right cleaner or solvent to soften one layer without damaging the layer underneath. It was fascinating to watch his at first seemingly fruitless attacks gradually reveal the stunning beauty of Kent’s painting. With the revealing of the eyes, nose and mouth, the somewhat random-seeming patches that we had peeled off earlier suddenly coalesced into the long-obscured image of the “Freeway Lady.” And as Kent painted the black around the outline of her hair and shawl, we could all see that she was really back. There she was! It had been a long day of hot, grueling work at times (not to mention answering all those pesky reporters’ questions), but there was the payoff! What a thrill to be able to bring back one of L.A.’s finest and best loved landmarks from complete oblivion! Of course the job not yet complete, but at least she is back. Her enigmatic (and temporarily somewhat clouded) gaze is once more scrutinizing northbound travelers on the Hollywood Freeway, perhaps reminding them of their own mothers or grandmothers. Kent is always busy with new commission work. Two mural monuments of Will Rogers are near completion at the California Theatre in San Bernardino; and a trio of family subjects are going up at the Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City. In between he’s managed to work directly with the volunteer group on the “Freeway Lady” at both January and April sessions. |
MURAL COMMUNITY MARKS LOSS
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Passing of Helen Lundeberg, Eva Cockroft, Tim Fields and Russ Carlton within six month period
| Symbolizing the connection of the past to the present, the mural movement in Los Angeles lost one of its most important historical exponents of modernism, one of its strongest links to the politically rooted mural work of the 1960s and ‘70s, and two productive and promising younger artists. |
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According to Robin Dunitz’ account in “Street Gallery,” Russell Carlton hailed “originally from the Midwest by way of Arizona, Carlton lived in Los Angeles for about 10 years. In addition to being a painter, he was a marble sculptor and a graphic artist.” A victim of AIDS, Carlton’s two stylized and symbolic murals were used to help raise funds for Aids Project Los Angeles. |
| Russell Carlton, “Unto Ye Heavenly Garden of Knowledge”, on the Santa Monica Freeway in West Los Angeles, 1993. | Helen Lundeberg’s mural work was a product of the 1930’s and ‘40s government public art programs. Together with her husband Lorser Feitelson she played a crucial, pioneering role in the establishment of international modernism in Los Angeles beginning in the 1930’s. Her more than sixty-year career placed her near the front rank of Los Angeles’ art history. Excerpted from a 1995 essay by Tobey Moss: |
| “In the beginning, 1930, Lundeberg was a promising student at the Stickney School in Pasadena. Lorser Feitelson, her teacher and, eventually, her husband, directed her to think of herself as an artist. “Her first one-person show [was] in 1933 at the Stanley Rose Gallery in Hollywood. By 1934 she and Feitelson co-founded "Post-Surrealism" and she wrote the "manifesto" for the first Post-Surrealism exhibition at the Centaur Gallery, Hollywood. |
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“When the WPA/FAP followed other government-sponsored programs for public art, Lundeberg applied and was assigned to the prints division and then to the mural division where she designed, painted and coor-dinated the team-painting of numerous murals in schools, federal and other public buildings. She also created the largest petrachrome mural-wall (8 feet high and 24l feet long) for Centinela Park in Inglewood, California.” |
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Eva Cockroft was a rare and exceptionally productive multi-talented artist who not only created notable murals but wrote cogently about them from a critical perspective. In an obituary article Daniel del Solar wrote:
“Eva S. Cockcroft passed away on April 1, 1999 after a courageous battle with breast cancer. Born in Vienna, Austria, she came as an infant to the United States when her physician parents sought refuge from Nazi tyranny. A graduate of Cornell University and Rutgers University, she became a prominent visual artist during the activist era of the late 1960's. “Her large scale murals in New York, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Germany, Nicaragua and elsewhere reflected her lifelong commitment to a consistent moral vision in art. Her last mural, "Homage to Siqueiros," was a reconstruction of Siqueiros's "America Tropical," whitewashed in Los Angeles in 1938. Her large body of paintings and drawings, regularly exhibited in individual |
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and group shows, also expressed her powerful contribution to the tradition of socially conscious figurative art.
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Eva Cockroft with her final mural, “Homage to Siqueiros” at Self-Help Graphics East L.A. location in 1999. |
| “During her final illness, she produced artworks about breast cancer in order to raise public consciousness about this devastating disease. A writer as well as an artist, she was the co-author of "Towards A People's Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement," published in a second edition in 1998. Her articles, which appeared in such leading art journals as Artforum and Art in America, are widely recognized as seminal contributions to mid- to late-20th century art criticism. She also taught art history and studio art at CSU Long Beach, UCLA, and UC Irvine.” Tim Fields combined the role of artist and teacher in energentically producing numerous murals with the assistance of mostly underprivileged children for the better part of this decade. From an L.A. Times article by Elaine Woo on Fields’ shocking sudden death: “Tim Fields, a Los Angeles artist who worked with schoolchildren to create 53 murals around the city, has died. He was 35 and died March 9 at his home of a respiratory infection. “A graduate of Illinois State University, Fields worked with many troubled youths and believed in the redeeming value of art. ‘Young people just need a chance, some understanding and something to take pride in,’ he said. . . “Fields arrived in Los Angeles from Chicago in 1986. He organized his first group mural project in 1991 at the Los Angeles Youth Network, a shelter for teenage runaways in Hollywood. Other murals followed. Gloria Gold, who runs the Halcyon Center [in North Hollywood], said Fields was a warm and comical figure with a mass of curly blond hair who usually wore the paint-splattered rags of his trade. She said he had a knack for communicating with children, many of whom were as young as five. According to Gold. . .Fields often told the children that he became an artist by copying characters from comic books. ‘He would say, ‘I copied them over and over again, and if you really want to, you can do it too.” He was a wonderful inspiration.’” |
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