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Artist Kent Twitchell displays a print version of the original "Freeway Lady," while behind him the mural begins to reemerge.Photo © Melissa Anderson

Many Kent Twitchell fans were excited to read in a recent L.A. Times article that the "Freeway Lady" is about to return. We've been waiting for almost ten years now. I spoke to Kent shortly after that newspaper story appeared and was disappointed to learn things are again at a standstill, but thrilled to hear about all Kent's other mural projects in the works.

So far the owner of the Prince Hotel has paid out $10,000 of the $250,000 he agreed to in the settlement of a few years back. Kent's (and the Mural Conservancy's) conservator, Nathan Zakheim, recently did some preliminary removal of the white paint covering the image, but will stop until further funds become available. Negotiations between Amy Nieman, Kent's lawyer, and Mr. Kurakawa continue. Kent is optimis tic that the money will be paid soon, as Mr. Kurakawa appears more willing to work things out.

In the meantime, Kent is hoping to start a new mural in the city of San Bernardino by the end of September. The five-story-tall portrait will either be James Whitmore as humorist Will Rogers or Hugh O'Brien as lawman Wyatt Earp. The most likely site is an historic theater in the downtown area.

It also looks likely that by the end of the year he will get back to work on the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra mural facing the Harbor Freeway in downtown L.A. He has decided to go ahead with the money raised, using art students at Biola University as assistants. Kent will add another 25 musicians, including two other large figures. That project was originally funded by the 1%-For-Art fee charged to large developers, Mitsubishi in this case.

Kent has been living in northern California with his family since shortly after the earthquake of January, 1994. There is a good possibility they will be moving back to L.A. soon. In the meantime, Kent spends several days a month down here working on various projects. He has agreed to lead another day-long tour of his murals in Fall, 1997.

Other mural concepts Kent has in mind to do in the not-too-distant-future are Charlton Heston in Hollywood, Johnny Cash in Nashville, and a young, raw Elvis in Memphis. Stay tuned.

The Mural DoctorHOW THE "FREEWAY LADY" IS RETURNING: A HISTORY

Conservator Nathan Zakheim and artist Kent Twitchell take a break beneath the "Freeway Lady's" tight-lipped surveillance.
Photo © Melissa Anderson

Once again, it is time to re-visit the "Old Woman of the Freeway" Kent Twitchell's consummate masterpiece of the mural genre. Originally painted in 1974, the mural was bifurcated in 1978 by the erection of a one story building in front of it. The roof line of the new restaurant and club belonging to the Prince Hotel (owned by the redoubtable Mr. Kurakawa) neatly cut it in half, covering the "Freeway Lady" from the waist down with concrete blocks and paint.

Interestingly enough, the lower portion of the mural was carefully preserved by the general contractor who (knowing well the eventual non-endurance of things constructed) carefully preserved a ventilated air space between the mural and the wall so that the mural could at some future time be re-displayed after the concrete-block bar and club was no more (He apologized to Twitchell, saying that he was appalled to see how much of the mural had been covered by the revised plans of the designer; an earlier version had left more mural on display.).

In 1986 the building owner succumbed to the notion of using the space occupied by the mural as a location for advertising that would be visible from the northbound Hollywood Freeway. Through his agent, Blue Wallscapes, the visible upper portion of the mural was coated with nonsoluble sign painter's block-out paint labeled with the contact number of the agency. Mr. Kurakawa eagerly awaited advertisers to come flocking to have their billboards pasted there for some gratifying fee.

Instead, the segment of the greater Los Angeles Community concerned with the creation, preservation and appreciation of art flew into a collective rage. Meetings were held, and articles were published in the local press as well as magazines and newsletters. In the midst of this expression of outrage, the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles was founded by a group of muralists and other supporters to right this specific wrong.

The upshot: rather than profiting, Kurakawa encountered costs. First, Cal Trans blocked sale of the wall space for billboard advertising. Federal law prohibits such sale within 100 feet of a freeway--only signage promoting the building's business occupant(s) is permitted. Then, represented by arts attorney Amy Nieman (then of Folger and Levin), Twitchell sued Kurakawa for violations of the California Art Preservation Act, a law specifically designed to protect artwork and requiring notification of the artist prior to any work being done to a physical structure that could negatively impact the work of art--which Kurakawa had not done.

Murals have been accorded removable art status under the Art Preservation Act due in part to application of my own "Strappo" mural removal method, which allows the paint layer to be removed from the wall without the wall itself being significantly damaged. I not only found a way to remove the white over-paint from the "Old Woman of the Freeway" but also found that the mural could be removed from the wall well within the parameters of the "Strappo" technique, should that become necessary.

After a considerable amount of litigation, Mr. Kurakawa not only found himself without the right to paste advertising over Twitchell's famous mural, but out of pocket for a court-ordered settlement with the artist and his attorney of $250,000.

At this point Twitchell called in Nathan Zakheim Associates and asked that a representative area be revealed so that freeway travelers could see that the mural was alive and well and that it would be brought back to life very soon.

The eye area was selected as the specimen area to be revealed. The artist confided that the two eyes were different: One was very strict and severe, while the other was filled with grandmotherly love, kindness and compassion.

In our discovery phase, at which time we were able to test the mural with a variety of solvents and over-paint removal techniques, we discovered that the best technique for removal was miraculously simple. Using heat guns, we were able to loosen the layer of white paint covering the mural by melting the layer of Liquitex Gloss Varnish that the artist had used to coat the surface of the acrylic paint. This enabled us to gently lift the coat of white paint from the surface, leaving the mural image in a completely undamaged condition.

Fortuitously, the binding medium of the acrylic paint and the gloss varnish used to coat it share identical melting points. This was due to the fact that, both being Liquitex products, the same basic formula was used to create each.

The ability to melt the varnish without melting the paint layer depended on the fact that the pigment of the paint absorbs heat due to it's chemical composition, and thereby increases the temperature at which the paint layer melts as compared to the melting point of the varnish. The few degrees of difference between the melting point of the varnish and the paint comprised our miracle!

Working with precision within that narrow variance of temperature has allowed us to remove the white covering paint front the layer of varnish without melting the paint itself, and we were able to rernove an area approximately 14" high by 30" wide.

Imagine our horror to find that after only a few weeks of renewed visibility, the punctilious Mr. Kurakawa had ordered the area we had uncovered around "The Freeway Lady's" mysterious eyes painted over again! This time, however, the white block-out paint had been applied over this most important area of the mural. And worst of all, the varnish had been stripped during the process of removing the original coat of insoluble white paint. The new coat of block-out was directly touching the mural and as a result, almost impossible to to remove.

Last year the artist once again brought me to the "Freeway Lady" mural site. This time we removed large areas of other parts of the body, and coated the areas revealed with Soluvar after the block-out paint had been removed using the heat-gun process. This newest attempt at revealing the painted surface of the mural left bright patches of colored clothing exposed.

After a brief fanfare of publicity, together with optimistic projections for the completion of the work, the restoration process descended dismally once again into the quagmire of inactivity.

Wait a minute, wasn't there a settlement meant to finance full restoration made several years earlier? Didn't Kurakawa receive a court order to pay for this restoration, along with legal fees and punitive damages to compensate the artist for a small portion of the indignity and infamy of having his masterpiece obscured?

Well, ten thousand dollars had in fact been paid by Kurakawa, all of which went to cover a portion of Folger and Levin's legal services. The rest is something of a mystery. The artist apparently was required to pay $600 for filing fees, and more than a year went by before that was done. After that, despite a court order, several years slipped by. No payments, no promise of payments, and no court action to compel payment.

Certainly the legal minds pursuing this case were not the feral, single mindedly savage type about which the plethora of lawyer jokes have been created. Unlike a person with a late parking ticket or a delinquent Columbia House Video payment, Mr. Kurakawa was left in undisturbed peace. Of course, he languidly hinted that he probably didn't have enough money to pay, or that the sum should be cut in half so that he could, but even that did not produce the usual flurry of settlement conferences and intense and urgent fax storms in which terms would be haggled, stipulations entered and conditions imposed.

So it came as no surprise to the small, underfed, but patient army of conservators that this Summer, once again, work needed to be done "on spec" at the "Freeway Lady" mural site. The equipment was once again dragged in the intense summer heat to the oven-like roof. The press feasted their lenses once again on the repeatedly newsworthy conservation "miracle" of paint being lifted off of melted varnish to reveal the undamaged mural surface beneath.

This time, Monica Valladares had joined the crew. Fresh from Mexico City and the excavations of the Templo Mayor of venerable Aztec origins, she applied her conservation and archeological training to excavation of a modern painting from under an even more modern attack of official vandalism and graffiti. From her perspective it was very hard to understand why, in the United States, one of it's most estimable works of public art would so quickly be buried under white paint in the lifetime of the artist. As a specialist in colonial religious paintings, she was used to the ravages of time taking centuries, not mere decades, to accomplish it's erosion. For her, this was an experience of culture shock.

The heat guns were plugged in and aimed; the cameras began their staccato, motor-driven frenzy; the artist posed with a variety of paraphernalia including a conservator or two; Kurakawa, almost sonambulant after so many years without a sign of hostilities, or even a small border skirmish, welcomed one and all to the Prince Hotel, making courteous suggestions as to where to plug the power cords and where we might conveniently store our ladders. Large amounts of paint came off of the melted varnish, and as usual, revealed the pristine surface of the mural.

What a difference the passage of time had made!

Now we were dealing with repeated coats of white paint over repeated applications of multicolored spray can graffiti. Areas that we had previously cleaned had been "hit" with more graffiti and naturally, the tidy Mr. Kurakawa had arranged for white paint to be applied each time that occurred. The heat-gun loosened paint came off in bizarre sheets in a Jacob's coat of paint of many colors. Aided by the use of chopsticks to hold the infernally hot sheets of paint, the conservation team revealed large areas of mural paint.

The two day effort had ended. The bottles of Evian water had been drunk. The press had given thorough interviews with everyone (including Mr. Kurakawa, who was a bit taken aback by the ferocity of the media team). The artist and his attorney smiled and declared it all to be a huge success.

Then, as so many times before: Tired, hungry, overheated, and unpaid, we all went home.

Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles Journal

Published quarterly, © 1996, Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (MCLA).

Editor: Bill Lasarow
Contributing Editors:
Robin Dunitz, Orville O. Clarke, Jr., Richard Solomon, Nathan Zakheim
Masthead Logo Design: Charles Eley.

The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles was formed to help protect and document murals, and enhance public awareness of mural art in the greater Los Angeles area. These programs are made possible by the tax-deducible dues and donations of our members, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, the California Arts Council, the National/State/County Partnership Program, and the Brody Fund of the California Community Foundation.