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Mural Art in the Florida KeysThe Spiritual Traveler
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 Driving
down the Intercoastal Highway from Key Largo to Key West, I passed a
garage near Islamorada with a mural of a sphinx painted on its
exterior. I stopped to take a picture of it, and as I was
doing so, the owner of the garage appeared.
"Pretty interesting, huh?" he prompted.
"Yeah," I
agreed. On the right side of the garage was the sphinx that
had caught my eye, but the left side was even more interesting,
depicting mysterious ruins that looked vaguely Egypian, Hindu, or Aztec.
"Was it a local artist that did it?" I inquired.
"No. He was an
Englishman. He just showed up one day and said he had to my
building."
"Just like that?"
 "Just like that."
"And you never heard from him again?"
"Never heard from him again."
I continued on my journey,
wondering what would prompt someone to simply want to paint a building
like that. A few miles up the road, another building caught
my eye. This one was four stories high and had a mural that
wrapped around two sides of the building. The mural was a
seascape that featured a mermaid. I came upon a number of
other buildings covered with murals on the way to Key West, so that by
the time I arrived I decided to investigate the phenomenon.
I first stopped by the Wyland
Gallery on Duval Street. The artist, Wyland, paints whales
on a monumental scale. This is non-profit work, the purpose
of which is to educate the public about whales and ecology, in
general. A poster on the wall exhibited pictures of 85 walls
painted around the world over a period of nineteen years, with 100
walls projected to be completed by the year 2011-one of the lengthiest
art projects in history. Some of the bigger building looked
very impressive, but the theme of whales, whales, whales made a
somewhat monotonous impression.
"How many of these murals are
here in the Keys?" I asked one of the salesgirls in the
gallery.
 "There are three," she replied. "One is on a K-Mart in Marathon."
"I saw that on my way down today."
"There's another one at the
Museum of Natural History in Marathon, and the third is at the
Waterfront Market, here in Key West."
"How does he fund this work?" I wanted to know.
"The paint is donated. The labor is contributed by volunteers."
The motivation for Wyland's
murals was clear. He had a particular cause he was
promoting. I was still thinking about the story the garage
owner had told me, of the artist who had just walked up to him and
asked to paint his building, and mentioned this to the salesgirl.
 "There
are younger artists who just want to draw attention to themselves," she
commented. "Wyland did some early work like
that. There's a picture in his biography of an Alpine scene
he painted on a Dairy Queen, and another one of a big bowl on a meat
packing plant."
I asked her what other murals
were worth checking out in town. She mentioned an interior
mural at Neptune Designs, a jewelry store, also on Duval
Street. I found the place. The mural was a small
one of a flamingo and some foliage, which draped the entrance to a
storage room behind the jewelry counter. I asked about the
artist, got his name and number, called from a pay phone at the public
library, and was told I was welcome to stop by.
The artist's name was Jim
Lehmkuhl. His house was located in a seedy area of town
almost at the very end of Highway 1. It was surrounded by a
locked wooden gate, on which I knocked ineffectually. I
noticed the buzzer just as the artist appeared.
"That's all
right. It doesn't work, anyway," he said, as I gestured to
it. He was a wiry man, bald on top, with a sleek gray
goatee, and a large gold ring in his left ear. He ushered me
into a palatial residence with numerous self-constructed, self-painted
rooms, and finally onto a unique veranda, filled with plants and
murals. The interior featured a jacuzzi, numerous
hand-painted picnic tables, and what looked like a small dance floor.
"Wow," I commented. "This is amazing!"
"It's a party place," he replied dryly.
 I
sat down on one of the picnic tables, opposite him. He got
up and fetched me a glass of water while I absorbed the stunning
interior. I was particularly struck by what appeared to be a
mural of a native woman selling fruits and vegetables. When
he sat down again, I told him of my drive down to Key
West. I first mentioned the garage with the sphinx.
"I never noticed that one," he said.
"Then there was one of a mermaid, a few miles down the road."
"Yeah, I did that one."
"You did that
one?" I was surprised at how easily I had found the author
of the most grandiose of all the murals I had seen. "How did
that come about?"
"It was 1987. A
guy approached me from a magazine. On top it says: 'Welcome
to the Florida Keys.' Underneath there was supposed to me
the magazine's name. But the magazine never got
published. I never got paid for it. The guy gave
me an initial deposit, then went bankrupt, fled to Texas, and gave me a
bad check. It was supposed to be a marine
magazine. That's the reason the mural is of an underwater
scene. The building was supposed to be his headquarters."
 "But it doesn't have the name of a magazine on it," I remarked. "It just says: 'Welcome to the Florida Keys.'"
"That's right," he
replied. "I took the name off when I wasn't
paid."
"I see," I laughed.
"So that's actually thirteen
years old," Lehmkuhl continued. "It's held up pretty well."
I mentioned some of the other murals I had seen, and Wyland's name came up.
"Actually, while I was doing
that one, I had never heard of Wyland. One day a guy stopped
in a car while I was on the scaffold. He introduced himself,
said his name was Wyland, that he was a muralist, and he never liked
any other murals, except this one. I said, 'Well, thank
you'," Lehmkuhl ended the story in his dry, no-nonsense manner.
 I
laughed again, and felt like building up to a
compliment. Wyland's work was impressive, and his success
must have been somewhat intimidating to other muralists, such as
Lehmkuhl, but the latter's work-particularly what I saw on this
veranda-was more
personable. "I
went into his gallery," I remarked, "and looked at the pictures of all
the murals. Some of them are huge, and very impressive."
Lehmkuhl nodded his head in agreement.
"The really huge ones are
cool, and they definitely make a statement about whales, and he doesn't
make any money off of them, so that's cool…"
"He makes millions from being published."
"From being published?"
"Yes. He asked me
if I was published, and I didn't know what he was talking
about. He has books and calendars and
posters. That's where he makes his money." There
was a touch of envy in his voice.
 "It's
a good cause," I said, still working on my compliment, "and the large
size is great, but just on the level of personal taste, whales, whales,
whales would get to me after a while. I mean, this right
here," I pointed to the picture of the native woman, "does more for me
than the whales."
"It was for the inside of a
store," Lehmkuhl explained. "It's on a piece of thin wood,
called doorskin, an eighth of an inch thick."
"So it's not really a mural. It's not painted directly on the building."
"No. It was from a
store that used to be in Key West called 'Jamaica Me
Crazy'. It was part of a three-dimensional
display. You see in the bottom corner, how the fruit are
falling off the stand?"
"Yes."
"Well, they had a little bus in the shop-it was actually a fire truck
that was painted to look like a bus-and it was set it up so that it
appeared that the bus was running into the fruit
stand. There was fruit painted all over the floor,
too."
"I really like that," I told
him. Do you do more interior work than exterior work?"
He nodded his head. "There's a chain called Miami
Subs. I was the original muralist for them. They
started in Key West, and grew all throughout Florida, and also in New
York."
 "So part of the concept of the chain is that they have murals inside, and you were the muralist for the whole chain?"
"I was. Then they started building stores faster than I could paint them."
"It sounds lucrative."
"For me, you mean?"
"Yeah."
"It paid my bills for about
ten years. Retail store design is one of my main ways of
making a living. That includes doing the interior murals, as
well as the floors. But that's to sell
merchandise. It's not an outlet for
self-expression."
 When
I asked what he did for self-expression, he ushered me into his studio,
where there were a number of small canvases with strange, twisted
designs.
"You should have been a sculptor," I remarked.
"That's what I am," he replied, "a frustrated sculptor."
"Well, some sculptors are frustrated artists," I laughed.
I asked him if he had any
particular artistic inspiration, and he mentioned Salvador Dali, which
I had anticipated from viewing the work in his studio. I
thought of some of Dali's work that I had seen, and much of it had a
sculptural quality. "Dali never did murals, though, did he?"
I asked.
"Well, some of his paintings are bigger than my murals."
 "Can a canvas be stretched that large?"
"It can be
done. Twenty feet," Lehmkuhl replied. "You should
check out the Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. It's a
surprising collection of work."
After parting from Mr.
Lehmkuhl, I drove back from Key West to Marathon. Along the
way, I noticed another interesting piece of roadside art, done not on a
building but on a car. It was a little Geo Metro, parked on
the grass in front of a bar called Boondocks. I went inside
and asked about the artist.
"His name is
Hugo. He and his wife live in Key Largo," the bar owner
replied. "They're both artists."
I got the telephone number,
called, and arranged to drop by the next time I was back in Key
Largo. A few days later, I found the place.
 This
time, the exterior of the brightly colored house clearly advertised the
fact that its occupants were of the artistic profession. An
extremely friendly couple greeted me-Hugo and Dominga Villanueva-the
husband Argentinian, his wife Haitian. The interior of their
house was hand-painted, just as Jim Lehmkuhl's was, but in a more
methodical, systematic fashion. The colors-gold, peach,
aquamarine, fuchsia, orange, and lime-were not pastels, but deep and
rich. Some startling paintings hung on the walls, including
a monstrous red and white mottled fish with bug
eyes. Another wall hanging was a representation of two giant
parrots, made of pounded sheet metal, meticulously painted in red,
blue, green, gold, and other colors. Dominga offered me a
seat. It was she who spoke English while her husband mainly
listened to our conversation, nodded his assent, and occasionally
repeated his wife's words for emphasis.
I told Dominga about my
conversation with Jim Lehmkuhl, and the story of the artist who painted
the sphinx on the garage. I asked her the same question I
had asked him: "Do you ever just have the desire to paint something-a
building for instance-for no other reason than that it's
there?"
 "Oh,
of course," she replied. "There are things that you see that
you'd like to paint. We've seen building that we'd like to
paint. It's not just about money. Some people
become very businesslike, very hard. But it would be nice to
do something for free. That's where you get to express
yourself, really. There's a place called Samuel House, at
the entrance to Key West. It's a place for homeless women
and children. "Every time we drive into Key West, I always
tell Hugo, "I think it would be so neat to give these women a bright
place, you know, a painted building… We've never, of course, approached
them."
"But you could," I suggested.
"Well, we don't have the time, of course, to go ahead and do that,
because we have to work so hard. Hugo has to work so hard,
and I have to manage the business."
I asked about the car that I had seen at Boondocks.
 "We
were commissioned to do that," Dominga replied. "It was a
red car, a red Geo. From red, we went to metallic blue."
You did the whole thing in metallic blue, just as a background?"
"That's right. The owner wanted three mermaids on
it. He had three daughters, so he wanted three
mermaids." They showed me some pictures of other
commissioned works. One was of a large motor home with a
picture of The Little Mermaid on one side and Goofy on the
other. "It was kind of frustrating to do the cartoons,"
Dominga said.
"Why was that?"
"Well, how artistic can you get copying something that's already been
done?" Dominga asked rhetorically.
"And how do people hear of you?" I wanted to know.
"They see our work. We exhibit in over fifteen galleries as
far away as Annapolis, Maryland, and Cape Cod."
 One
of the pictures they showed me was of Sherman's Marine Supply, which I
had also passed on Big Pine Key. It featured a huge mural of
a sun disc with a human face, painted in vivid colors.
"We can't paint pastels," Dominga said. "We have a hard time
with pastels."
"You mean it's hard just because it goes against your nature?"
"I guess so," she replied. "It's just really hard."
I asked them how long they had lived in the United States.
"Hugo has been here six years, and I've been here for ten," Dominga
told me. "He was in the military before that. He
used to have a gun instead of a paintbrush, but I changed
that. He was fourteen years in the military in Argentina,
and worked for the United Nations as a police monitor. And
now he's painting!"
 The
bulk of their art turned out mainly to consist of the metal work, of
which the giant parrots on the wall were an example. Hugo
and Dominga took me out in back to see their work area. The
place was littered with the sheet metal forms of animals, giant
lizards, salamanders, and frogs, especially. Hugo and
Dominga showed me a large machine that made a noise like a compressor,
which they called a plasma cutter. After throwing a switch
on the machine, Hugo picked up a blowtorch attached to the machine and
showed me how it was able to cut the sheet metal in a meticulous
pattern.
"This is a traditional Haitian form of art," Dominga
explained. "But what I've done is to take if
further. Instead of doing what they do in Haiti, I've
modernized it a little bit. In Haiti, it was very
primitive. They did figurines, and the metal art was
considered voodoo art. They worked it in the shapes of
spirits, to put on graves in the cemeteries. That's how it
started. Then they started making flowers and
fish. They commercialized it to take it out of Haiti."
 I
walked around the scattered pieces, taking photographs. I
particularly liked the smaller salamanders and a little green frog,
which they gave me. We talked a little about life in the
United States. They said that they preferred life in the
Dominican Republic, where they had a second home.
"There is more culture there," Dominga said. "In this
country, people are not aware of other cultures. That's what
you could do with your web site-make people more aware of the rest of
the world."
I promised them that I would try to do that. |
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Date Submitted:
2004-01-02 00:00:00 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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