If someone showed these colorful, detailed exterior murals to Allen Russell and told him that the artist is a novice who never tried to do art before, “I’d think they were lying,” he said.
But Russell is the artist, and he insists he first picked up the paint on June 28 of this year.
“I’m 47 years old, and this is totally new to me,” Russell said. “I have no art training. I suck at using a brush. I can’t even draw well. But I know how to use a spray can!”
He added that his wife, Kimberly, who teaches English as a second language courses at Clark College, and his daughter Dramma, a ninth-grader at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, “can both attest” to his lack of background as an artist.
“It’s like discovering you can play the piano, and you’d just never tried,” he said.
Why did he? Because of life and death.
Russell is a multi-instrumentalist who hasn’t been able to make a living at music, he said, and he’s a newly trained piano tuner who’s trying to drum up some business. Meanwhile, a friend from California has made a killing as a muralist, he said. He’s also a Gulf War-era military veteran who didn’t see combat but emerged with post-traumatic stress disorder nonetheless, he said.
“Painting calms restlessness brought on by military service,” he wrote in an email.
There’s another reason why Russell picked up the paints back in June: His mother’s health was taking a serious nosedive, and Russell felt the end was near. MaryJane Russell eventually died in early October, the night before The Columbian was to visit. Russell insisted on keeping the appointment, and he demonstrated his deceptively simple stencil-and-spray paint technique on an especially visionary, pyrotechnical panel he was doing in his mother’s honor.
Russell said he wants to inspire just-plain folks to try things: “Don’t say, ‘I can’t.’ Just try.”
His wife was away on a trip when he took a sudden notion to turn a fence at the back of their corner yard, just a few blocks east of Clark College at 16th and X streets, into that famous album-cover image of “Abbey Road,” complete with the Fab Four striding in the crosswalk. Russell texted a request for spousal permission, and Kimberly gave it — skeptically, figuring it would be easy enough to paint over, she confessed.
But when she saw the final product — which he finished in a couple of weeks, starting with rolled-on blue and gray backgrounds for the sky and the street, then expanding the original image to create handmade stencils for the many interior details, from tree textures to Beatle faces — she told him to go ahead and follow his bliss, he said.
“I am still blown away on a daily basis,” she said. “I couldn’t understand how he was doing it.”
All of which has led to a blossoming of neighborhood connections, Kimberly said.
“I have seen the ice cream truck driver, the garbage collector and UPS drivers all taking photos … from their trucks,” she wrote in an email. “We’ve had high-schoolers skateboarding by yell, ‘That’s amazing!’ to Allen as he was painting. We have met neighbors we had never met before in our seven years of living here. … We’ve gotten to know casual acquaintances much better, as they started to stop by on a daily basis to see what Allen had painted that day.”
The artist abides
People keep coming into the yard like it’s a museum — most respectfully, that is — to pose for pictures in front of the Abbey Road crosswalk, just like tourists visiting the real Abbey Road in London do. They frown at the unfinished Interstate 5 Bridge as it seems to float uncertainly in time (just like the real one?); they contemplate Andrew Wyeth’s melancholy Christina as she contemplates “Christina’s World”; and they ask why Jesus is drinking half-and-half.
That’s not Jesus, folks. The right-hand panel of what Russell calls his “trippytich” is The Dude, the lovable stoner portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the cult classic “The Big Lebowski.” (He was always drinking White Russians with half-and-half, remember?) Left of The Dude is a glowing scene adapted from neoclassicist Maxfield Parrish, and to the left of that is the Delphic Sibyl figure borrowed straight from the ceiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
Ambitious stuff, but Russell says he’s just getting started. He means to cover all 120 feet of the L-shaped fence with Renaissance masterpieces; the Parthenon at night, with somebody holding up a tablet to snap a lousy photo of same; late Washington grunge rocker Kurt Cobain on myriad stacked TV sets; and a sprawling image of the moon landing, compete with hot movie lights, stagehands and director Stanley Kubrick making sure it all looks as realistic as possible.
“Yeah, I’m one of those nutty conspiracy-theory guys,” Russell said. “Don’t get me started.”
(He added that people coming into the yard is starting to get old; please enjoy from the street or visit www.ocdlove.com to arrange a tour.)
On the morning after his mother’s death, when The Columbian visited, Russell got going on a mural inspired by her longtime employment by the Defense Department, he said, and his own churning emotions: Jimi Hendrix and his guitar, both in flames, before a weeping American flag and sideways peace sign. Russell mentioned Hendrix’s bluesy classic “The Wind Cries Mary” — with its mournful lyrics about “the broken pieces of yesterday’s life” — and said the name of this mural is “The Flag Cries Mary.”
“This flag is crying for my mom,” he said.
