A Brush With History
Young artist creates three-story mural
Courier Staff Writer
HISTORIC SCENE: Artist Tiffany Black works on a three-story mural overlooking The Madison Courier’s parking lot on West Street. When complete, the mural will depict several events in the area’s history. Black, below, has a draft of the mural. (Staff photos by Ken Ritchie)
Push apart entwined vines in the woods to look at the Ohio River, and you might see a scene similar to what artist Tiffany Black envisioned. That is the vantage point she chose for her massive mural on the south outside wall of Shipley's Tavern, 322 West St.She started with the framing to surround a scene of a packet boat on the river, the bluffs beyond and trees on the riverbank.
Black thinks of the framing as vines or perhaps roots, while some passers-by think it is a ribbon and others see it as a rope. Eighteen round openings in the vines will have pictures of historic icons that people are paying to sponsor. "I've tried to put my own little twist with the frame I've designed that symbolizes vines or roots intertwining and connecting these little bits and pieces of Madison's history," she said. "I guess it adds my modern perspective to Madison's history."
Black didn't just climb onto the lift the day after her 23rd birthday last month and start painting a picture. A lot of work went into the mural before she dipped the first brush into acrylic paint.
The mural had its genesis in 2007, when Shipley's owner Cris Sauer talked to former Hanover College professor Robyne Hart, who then was the director of Hanover's Center for Business Preparation, where Black was a student. He told Hart he wanted to find an artist to paint a mural on the side of his building.
Hart gave Black's contact information to Sauer.
Black agreed to do the mural, but first she had her graduation requirements to meet, including a three-month internship with muralist and gallery owner David Schuster in Louisville, Ky.
"He was doing a mural at Trinity High School," Black said. "I helped him with that every day. I organized his finances, redid his portfolio. He taught me how to run a small business, how to market myself as an artist. He taught painting classes in his studio, and I'd help with those."
She graduated with a major in studio art and a minor in French. "I decided to stay here because I really wanted to do this mural," she said during a break in painting. "The opportunity was just too good to pass up."
She rents a room from her art professor Leticia Bajuyo in Hanover and drives a car full of supplies to downtown Madison on days she is painting.
The West Street mural is Black's fourth mural including the one she helped with during her internship. She was chosen to paint a mural of trees in the Campus Center at Hanover College, and painted a mural at Lide White Boys & Girls Club. She also is doing a ceramic mosaic mural on the river side of the concrete wall at the judges stand on Vaughn Drive. Started as a Madison Bicentennial project, the mural was inspired by a Harlan Hubbard painting of a river scene. She works on it Monday afternoons, which are advertised as Mosaic Mondays when the public, both adults and children, are invited to help her.
For the West Street mural, Sauer wanted a river scene, so Black began getting ideas and doing research not only of local scenes but also "all kinds of research abut what I would have to do" to execute the mural.
And, she had to make a living and raise money for the mural. She joined Americorps, which placed her at the Lide White Boys & Girls Club, where she ran two after-school clubs during the school year. She still works there part-time. She was a substitute teacher for high school French. She worked at Whimsy for a while, and got a job waiting tables at joeyg's, where she only works now "when they really, really need me." She has applied for a grant from the Indiana Arts Council, and there was a fundraiser and drawing.
The mural now is mostly a full-time job. "I'm pretty much devoted to this," she said.
She took photographs of Madison scenes, but is relying largely on photographs at the Jefferson County Historical Society archives. "I want them to be as historically accurate as possible," Black said. "Ron Grimes (at the archives) has been a big help to me with the photographs."
To make a canvas, the nondescript plaster wall needed to be patched, and the people she hired gave her a good discount to help out. David Hearne at Kickin' Ash did the patching and John Roberts painted the wall white, using primer paint that Sherwin-Williams sold at a discount to help Black's project. TNT gave her a discount on a motorized lift.
Black painted a grid of squares to use as guides for turning her small sketch into a large painting on a building side that is three stories high and 80 feet long.
Four of the circles in the vine remain to be sponsored, three of them 3 to 4 feet in diameter and costing $600 each, and one that is 6 feet in diameter and costs $1,000 to sponsor. The four are on the side of the mural closer to West Street. Sponsors choose from a list that Black put together.
Among the icons not yet sponsored are the railroad incline, the Broadway Fountain and Eleutherian College, which Black wants to include because of its historic significance as a pre-Civil War institution open to blacks as well as whites, women as well as men, even though it is outside the city.
Scenes already sponsored include the Regatta, the Madison-Milton bridge, Clifty Falls, the Lanier Mansion, Lydia Middleton Elementary School, Hanging Rock Hill, Christ Episcopal Church and three scenes from Hanover College. The Regatta scene, which will be from the 1930s, was chosen by a child, Clayt Winters, whose name was on a raffle ticket that was drawn at a mural fundraiser. Black is pleased the Episcopal church will be depicted because her grandfather was an Episcopal bishop in Ohio. Hanover College "has been very supportive" of the mural, she said, with the college as a whole and the Rivers Institute among the sponsors.
The boat in the center of the mural was a real boat that worked on the Ohio River. Named the Revonah - that's Hanover spelled backward -it was a steamer whose owner and captain, Selby Turner, had his business on the river between East Street and St. Michael's Avenue.
His grandson, Dick Goodman of Madison, agreed to sponsor the middle of the mural, but asked that his maternal grandfather's boat be featured. It ran on the Ohio River in the early 1900s.
Goodman has a painting of the Revonah in his office at Madison Chemical Co. that was done by the late well-known artist and writer Harlan Hubbard, and he also has a photograph of the Revonah."I ended up going off a photograph rather than the Harlan Hubbard painting because I liked the composition better," Black said.
She hopes to complete the mural in the fall before the weather turns cold. When she is done with what she calls balancing it and with the scenes in the circles and the background for the rest of the building, she will call it finished. Paraphrasing a quote about art, she said, "An artist's work is never finished. He just chooses the time to abandon it."
>>Link to Madison Courier article
>>Other newspaper articles that mention the West Street Mural:
07/08 - Roundabout Madison "Mural Maiden"
09/08 - Roundabout Madison "Public Art Policy"
