ARTISTS GET THEIR OCTD ‘MURALS’ READY TO ROLL

Artist Janet Inez Adams loves nothing better than to paint the natural and man-made scenes that sweep across Orange County from the Saddleback Mountains to Upper Newport Bay.

The quietly flowing lines and muted blues and greens of “Saddleback Watch,” a vista of peaks, bay cliffs and office towers that is Adams’ latest work in progress, are typical of her landscapes.

But the studio and the canvas on which Adams is painting are anything but typical. Her newest “studio” is an Orange County Transit District garage in Garden Grove, and her “canvas” is the metal exterior of an OCTD bus.

“I’ve never worked on a canvas this large before. And I’ve certainly never worked on one that moves ,” said Adams, one of five veteran artists chosen to paint murals on the 41-foot-wide, 9 1/2-foot-tall sides of OCTD buses.

The novel murals are part of the district’s Art in Motion pilot project, which OCTD officials say is one of the only artistic experiments of its kind in the United States.

The “moving gallery” of five buses will be unveiled officially June 12 in ceremonies at the Bowers Museum annex parking lot in Santa Ana, and will be rolling down the roads the weekend of June 13 and 14.

“Talk about a new kind of visibility and audiences for artists: I’ve already got neighbors asking me when ‘my bus’ will be coming by their houses,” said Adams, who lives in Costa Mesa and has taught art at Cal State Fullerton and Orange Coast College, and has shown works at the Newport Harbor Art Museum and Laguna Art Museum.

The district hasn’t yet selected which of its 55 regular routes the mural buses will travel, but officials expect the new attractions to be show-stopping conversation pieces.

The mobile murals will run the gamut from Adams’ sweeping panorama of cliffs, mountains and office towers to Emigdio Vasquez’s depiction of the diverse people who live and work in the county.

In addition to Adams and Vasquez, who lives in Orange, the muralists are Janice DeLoof of Fullerton, John Yoyogi Fortes of Tulare and Jillian Stewart of Mission Viejo. The media being used are acrylics, lacquer and enamel.

Painting began three weeks ago at OCTD’s Garden Grove and Anaheim garages, according to the artists. The murals are being put only on the left--or driver--sides of the five buses. OCTD officials said it was decided to leave the right sides free for advertising placards, but other than that, the sky was the limit.

“We set no rules on theme or style. The idea was to let the artists go--to let them find their own form of expression and format,” said Kathy Zeutzius mural project coordinator at OCTD. “If there was a criterion, it was that we didn’t want decorative murals. We wanted real art and a diversity in styles.”

Even before the murals have been completed, OCTD’s Art in Motion project--a one-year trial run underwritten by Western Digital Corp. of Irvine--already has earned praise as the latest wrinkle in the growing nationwide trend to public-art ventures, district officials said.

Murals and other public-art displays have become increasingly familiar in parks and corporate plazas--and, more recently, on the walls of Los Angeles freeway corridors and New York City subway stations.

But displaying works of art on the sides of transit vehicles is rare, according to the American Public Transit Assn. In Los Angeles, for example, officials of the Southern California Rapid Transit District said they have no plans for a mural project such as Orange County’s.

“When we talk of bus exteriors, we’re still talking mostly advertising placards and those seasonal-decorated buses for Christmas shoppers or zoo patrons,” said Jane Kirkpatrick, spokeswoman for the American Public Transit Assn. in Washington. “But full-scale exterior art like theirs (Orange County’s) is still a very new form.”

The idea for the Art in Motion experiment stems from an article published last year in The Times by Emily Keller, manager of Brea’s Art in Public Places, a program for developer-financed outdoor sculptures.

OCTD aides said they read Keller’s description of the ways in which sculpture and other art forms can, and have been, displayed in public places, and noted with great interest her suggestion that the exteriors of buses could be used to extend the “urban canvas” beyond stationary exhibitions.

Zeutzius said that the district began to think that “public-art principles could just as well be applied to moving vehicles. And when Western Digital said it was willing to fund the effort, we were on our way.”

The next step was finding the artists who would make the concept at reality.

A competition was announced in January, and more than 50 entries were judged by a nine-member jury that included Kevin Consey, director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Mike McGee, programs coordinator of the Laguna Art Museum, and Paul Apodaca, folk-art curator of the Bowers Museum.

The five artists, all of whom have had works shown regularly in museums and private galleries in Southern California, were selected in April. Each received a $1,250 award from Western Digital.

According to Keller, the Brea city official who unwittingly spawned the project and who also served on the jury, some of the entries turned down “were too abstract, too bizarre--generally, a bit too shocking for the average viewer.”

Vasquez, the only one of the five artists who has done murals before, said: “You have to remember these works are for the general audiences. It was obvious the works should not be political or be offensive in any way to any group.”

Vasquez’s bus mural is similar to the panels on Orange County history he has done at Anaheim City Hall, the Friendly Center in Orange and at city parks and the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. His OCTD panel is dominated by powerfully drawn faces reflecting the county’s ethnic and economic diversity--”the kind of people you’d meet at a bus stop,” said Vasquez, who is currently artist-in-residence at Bowers Museum.

The other four also have used favorite themes from their earlier works. Stewart said her starkly composed mural, featuring leaping dogs and a flaming altar, deals with the dual nature of modern man--technologically advanced, yet still primitive in instincts.

DeLoof’s “Suburban Sunset” is another sparse work, with only a house and a few other urban symbols amid glowing reds, oranges and greens.

“At first, I wasn’t sure how to deal with the bus format--you know, how to wrap the art around those windows,” DeLoof said. Her solution: paint the central palm tree so that it soars between two windows.

Fortes’ whimsical mural of cactus, a dog and other wiggly shapes has made the most dramatic use of the bus configuration. He has painted the face of a man with a Cyrano-sized nose that covers the entire rear of the bus, including the elevated section housing the air-conditioner.

“For us (artists), it’s already been a fabulous experience,” Fortes said. “As for public reaction, no one can really predict that for sure--it’s all so new. We just have to wait until our buses hit the road.”