I spent the month of February working on an exciting project. My work was selected for a public art project for the new AVTEC (Alaska Vocational Technical Center) dormitory in Seward, AK. To be clear, the process started long before February, and began with an initial Request for Qualifications last summer, then a proposal, a series of sketches and drawings, as well as an installation plan. Last month was when I finally got to put paint to paper.

I am creating three murals, one for each floor of the dormitory, each depicting a different scene from the natural environment surrounding Seward. Since the dormitory serves many students from the culinary school, I included wild edibles one would find out in the surrounding environments.

Below is a detail of each mural. I'll post more photos of the finished work, when it's ready so stay tuned.

Above: Details of the painting of each mural. From left to right: the ocean floor, a river, and the forest floor.

One challenge (or opportunity) of creating public art is rendering work in a durable medium. I am lucky to be working Amy Baur and Brian Boldon of InPlainSight Art, who are both artists themselves and fabricated ceramic tiles with digital images of my paintings fused to them. They have been working on this process for the last few weeks and are ready to ship the finished tiles to Alaska on Monday. Soon I am headed to Anchorage to pick them up and install the work on site in Seward.