NORTH HOLLYWOOD : Where Surf and Sand Meet Bank

Westward, there’s the ocean with crashing waves, rocky cliffs and an orange-purple-red sunset. Eastward, there’s the parched, rust-colored desert and distant hazy mountains. Both come together on a bank building in North Hollywood.

The panoramic murals, stretching up two sides of the nine-story Great American Bank building at Victory Boulevard and Bellingham Avenue, were finished earlier this month after four months of work.

Three painters worked seven days a week, stopping only when winds were too high. “If the building was swaying, we didn’t go up,” said Edwin Abreu, president of the New York-based painting company, American Illusion.

The 85-by-40-foot murals were designed by Los Angeles artist Terry Schoonhoven, who has painted murals along the Harbor Freeway downtown and in Pasadena. A Schoonhoven mural of clouds frames a skylight in an artsy private home in Venice that was designed for World Trade Bank Chairman Roy Doumani and his wife, Carol, but has been pledged to UCLA. Another Schoonhoven work, “St. Charles Painting,” which is on the side of a building in Venice, features a mirror image of the street.

Schoonhoven specializes in trompe l’oeil , in which illusions appear real and three-dimensional, said his agent and project manager, Ron Davis of On-Site Murals in North Hollywood.

Sure enough, the east wall of the bank building, facing Laurel Canyon Boulevard, places the viewer in downtown Los Angeles near City Hall. It seems the viewer is looking through an open archway to a sandy beach with waving palm trees and a turquoise ocean. A fantastic rock arch, inspired by the natural Los Arcos of Cabo San Lucas, rises from the waves. Sea gulls soar past the clouds, which are tinted rust, gray and blue by the setting sun.

On the west wall, facing the Hollywood Freeway, the viewer is again downtown, this time gazing upon America’s vistas to the east. A highway curves past green hills and reaches the cactus and Indian adobe ruins in Arizona. Beyond that is the burnt sienna Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah and, farther off, a California condor swoops above the bluish Rockies.

“It’s something that lets the community’s imagination wander,” Davis said.

The painters started the mural in October, armed with photos and drawings. They sketched outlines in charcoal on the stucco-coated building. They painted the base colors and then drew in progressively smaller details, using a total of about 375 gallons of acrylic paint, Abreu said.

The murals, which cost $109,220 to design and paint, will last about 10 years, Abreu said. The final touch was to paint the top border of the building a sky blue, which was finished on Valentine’s Day.

This is the third mural to decorate the building since it was built in the 1960s, bank officials said. But it may be the most inspired. The first depicted the Los Angeles Raiders; the second celebrated America’s Bicentennial.