Funds for restoration of this mural donated by
Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership
Musical Youth,
The mural on the side of Studio Supply was one of the last I painted. Each year the Downtown Arts Festival had supplied students from the public schools to help, but by now the festival had lost support and faded from the scene. I hadn’t yet figured out that CHHS students could earn service-learning hours by helping paint. It really seemed that some of the impetus for painting the annual murals had dwindled, so I was glad that the Downtown Commission still wanted to have some artwork done that year. And I was determined to make it something really nice. Since the actual young artists and performers were no longer appearing downtown I decided to commemorate their many past years of effort in the new mural. Also, since I was now working on my own it seemed like an opportunity to do something more artistically challenging and show off a bit. To me nothing is more difficult than to draw the human figure and within that context musician’s hands, faces and postures are even tougher to draw, so I decided to paint musicians. I used a photo of a neighbor as the model for the teen-age girl playing the flute and dug out an old transparency from my picture files for the model of the boy playing the fiddle. By flipping the transparency of the boy I achieved what I thought was a nice composition in the proposal sketch, When the time to paint came it was, as I expected, quite difficult to do and at the end I was glad to be putting on the finishing touches. A man walked by. “You know,” he said, “I play the violin and that boy is playing backward. There are no left handed violins.” When I had flipped the transparency to set up the composition I had accidentally made an impossible left-handed violin. I took a while to think it over, decided it was just too embarrassing to leave up, and spent a number of days painting a new boy, with a correctly held violin, right over the first.
Michael Brown
Courtesy of The Chapel Hill News