Murals To Go

Things have been a little quiet around the Belmar Arts Council the past several weeks.   Besides the immediate disaster in Belmar caused by Sandy, the town, which technically owns the Boatworks, has needed the building as a headquarters for the collection and distribution of aid supplies for victims of the storm.  So no shows there for the time being, and I ended up moving my woodcut class to the Studio to finish out the remaining sessions.  The expectation is that we'll be able to return to the Boatworks in early January, and get it fixed up and back to business by the end of that month.

But that doesn't mean we don't have art going on.  Though water flooded large parts of the whole town, the heaviest damage occurred up by the beach, with pretty much the entire boardwalk and everything along it destroyed.  Once the town was reopened to traffic, drivers found that concrete barriers (often known as Jersey Walls) had been placed across the right lanes of east bound avenues where they crossed A Street, to help divert non-local traffic away from Ocean Avenue and all the heavy work going on up there.  Those concrete barriers have been doing that kind of job well for half a century, but that gray concrete isn't exactly pretty.  Since these things are expected to remain in place through the spring, it was proposed to make them nicer by painting them, creating a new series of temporary murals around the town.  Volunteers from the Girls Scouts and the BAC have taken up the job.   There's been too many rainy days since this idea was hatched, and I've known going back to the first BAC mural that paint doesn't dry easily on concrete when the temperatures drop toward winter.  But we've had a few nice days in a row, so artists were out in force today, and I was on foot getting photos of painters in action.  Above and below are two examples of completed murals (8th and 10th Avenues respectively).

There are a dozen other such walls between 7th and 20th, and at least several in progress.  Photos of the others will eventually get posted to the Belmar Arts Council blog when I get enough of them.