If you’ve driven on Interstate 93 in the vicinity of Exit 14 recently and glanced toward the downtown area, you may have noticed a large colorful mural.
Odds are it caught you by surprise and you didn’t have time to get a good look, going 55 miles per hour and all.
But don’t worry because it will be there for quite a while thanks to a partnership between Kimball-Jenkins and the owners of the Ralph Pill Marketplace building. The new piece of downtown art was unveiled on Oct. 13 and is hard to miss.
It’s 36 feet tall by 24 feet wide and was created by a group of local high school students who signed up for the latest public art display project put together by the folks at Kimball-Jenkins. Over the course of four months, the students spent about two to two and half hours a week to brainstorm, conceptualize, sketch and paint the finished product.
They spent a couple weeks just coming up with the idea before even picking up a paintbrush or pencil.
The goal was to have something that had recognizable New Hampshire qualities, which is why you see the State House dome, a ski mountain, the Old Man of the Mountain and a moose. But, you’ll also notice a few things that we might say came out of left field. That’s just the creative mind of high school students shining through.
“They had free reign with what they wanted to do,” said Ryan Linehan, managing director of Kimball-Jenkins.
The golden dome is under water and the moose is actually swimming above the tippy top. There’s a scuba diver, jellyfish and a dolphin jumping over the moon.
“We wanted it to be colorful,” said Carla Roy, who served as art instructor for the project. “Wanted it to be something people could see quickly, so it needed to be recognizable and not too detailed.”
In the written word it may sound a little odd, but as you can see from the photo above, it’s a really cool creation by a group of very talented artists.
“We were hoping to have it up by the end of August,” Roy said. “But everything takes longer than you expect.”
Now you might be wondering how these students were able to create a work of art that is so large, and there’s a perfectly good explanation for that – they didn’t.
It would be just about impossible to paint something that’s 36 feet by 24 feet, so instead they made a pair of paintings to scale. The first one was 2 feet by 3 feet and was proposed to the city for approval.
Once they had the go ahead, they made a second painting, double the size.
That was the finished product as far as they were concerned, but as you can see it ended up being a lot bigger.
“What you see on the building is an exact photo of what we created,” Roy said.
The original thought was to find a spot where the kids could actually paint on a wall or building, like the one done last summer through the Haley Rae Martin Scholarship Fund, which also funded this project.
Linehan wanted it in a visible location, but without any luck at a number of spots, he contacted Pill about his building.
He was all for the idea of the work going on his building, but the only problem is that it would have to be pretty high up.
“I can’t have them four stories up on scaffolding and ladders,” Linehan said.
So they decided they would take the painting and use a digital photo to be printed on a large mural. Because of the high resolution necessary, the painting was photographed in nine sections and put back together in Photoshop before being printed on the large mesh banner you see today.
“They’ve had banners up there before but they’d blow down,” Linehan said. “There’s thousands of holes in this one, so the wind can pass through.”
And now with two successful public art murals in the bag, the goal is to start fundraising for the next one.
“It would be nice to do one a year, but it comes down to funding,” Linehan said.
