A Tall Tribute : Muralist Toils to Honor Ed Ruscha, Key Figure in Contemporary L.A. Art

When muralist Kent Twitchell wanted to pay tribute to Hollywood and its movie stars in 1971, he chose Steve McQueen as his subject.

“He was the contemporary Humphrey Bogart-type movie star,” he said of the late actor.

The result was a 20-foot-high portrait on a friend’s two-story house on 12th Street near the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Seven years later, when he felt the urge to celebrate Southern California art and artists, he chose the five-story federal Job Corps training center downtown and artist Ed Ruscha.

“He is the Steve McQueen of the art world,” Twitchell said this week as he gazed up at his 70-foot, paint-and-plastic polymer likeness of the artist. “He sort of epitomizes Southern California contemporary art.”

Today, after eight years of off-and-on painting, the enormous tribute from one of the city’s leading muralists to the father of the city’s pop art movement is finally near completion. The mural, at 1031 S. Hill St., shows a serious Ruscha in a red shirt and black slacks standing and staring straight ahead.

Ruscha (pronounced rew-shay), known for turning words and phrases into ironic and often humorous pieces of art, is widely acclaimed within the art world but is almost anonymous outside it.

Sometimes called the “quintessential L.A. artist,” he was among a small group of artists who put Los Angeles on the international art map in the 1960s. Although he has been celebrated in retrospective exhibits, he stills calls himself an “underground” artist. He is known for celebrating the Hollywood sign in paintings and prints, for setting the county Museum of Art on fire in a painting and for photographing every building on the Sunset Strip, among other tributes to the city.

Ruscha, 48, said he likes the mural and is glad Twitchell is taking so long to complete it. “I kind of like the unfinishedness of it,” he said.

“You know how they build things nowadays . . . once something is finished, it’s forgotten,” he said. “When things are in progress they are always attended to.”

Conversation Piece

Twitchell said many people stop and talk to him about the painting, but most people don’t know who it is. “A lot of people think it’s an advertisement,” he said.

While they may not know Ruscha, the painting is at least making his looks familiar.

Ruscha said he was stopped one day by a stranger who asked, “Hey, aren’t you that guy on the side of the building?”

He said he was flattered when Twitchell, whom he had never met before, approached with the idea for the mural eight years ago. “I didn’t know quite what he had in mind, but I liked his work,” he said.

Twitchell has done 20 murals since the “Steve McQueen Monument,” his first. They include the Latino bride and groom near 2nd Street and Broadway, the “Old Woman of the Freeway,” which can be seen along the Hollywood Freeway near downtown, and “Christ at the Liquor Store,” on the side of Tiger Liquor Store on 111th Street and Vermont Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles.

Favors This One

Twitchell said this mural is one of his favorites.

“I’m very happy with it,” said the 43-year-old painter, dressed in paint-spattered jeans and a plaid cotton shirt as he munched on a peanut butter and alfalfa sprout sandwich.

Twitchell, whose combination home and studio is in Echo Park, has received almost $15,000 in grants from the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts to assist on the mural. For the most part, however, the mural has been a labor of love, he said.

He supports himself by painting portraits and selling some other paintings, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays he climbs into the old electric window-washers’ rig he uses to maneuver around his concrete canvas and puts the finishing touches on what he calls the “Ed Ruscha Monument.”

Fading paint has been the only problem he has had with the mural, he said.

Careful Mixing

Twitchell said he carefully mixed his paints to look like the warm colors used by painters like Rembrandt or Caravaggio, but older sections like the face and shirt have started to look sharper and colder over the years. He hopes a new paint he buys from Australia will solve the problem.

The technique he uses to paint murals is similar to the paint-by-numbers sets popular with children, he said.

“The first paint-by-numbers sets were actually mural cartoons,” Twitchell explained.

To start a mural, Twitchell photographs the subject, paints a portrait and then traces it onto a grid, outlining where each color should be, down to very close detail. The squares on the mini-drawing are then transposed onto 3-by-3-foot squares of carbon-backed paper.

Using a center line and grid marks, the squares are positioned and the lines transferred to the wall by retracing them with a ballpoint pen. All that is left to do is paint the right colors inside the lines.

Twitchell said the mural will look complete in October and “hopefully, in December, it will be done to my satisfaction.”