Painting Whales Is a Big Thing to This Man

He calls himself Wyland (“I prefer no first name,” he says), and he’s no stranger to controversy.

He says he’s “on a mission” to paint, in various imposing sizes in cities throughout the world, murals of whales swimming in what he calls gravely endangered waters.

Wyland, who has his home and studio in Laguna Beach, said Tuesday that he “just loves “ San Diego, this being one of the few cities that, so far, hasn’t complained about his work or ridden him out of town on a rail.

Robert Wyland is the artist who’s painting a 140-by-40-foot mural of killer whales on the wall of The Plunge in Mission Beach. The Plunge is a former city pool, a longtime landmark in San Diego, that has been restored as part of a new commercial complex near the Belmont roller coaster. The now-private pool is open to the public for $2 a swim.

Today The Plunge is the centerpiece of Fitness Advantage health club, the owners of which asked Wyland to come and display his talents on the wall of their building.

He describes his work, titled “Orcas Off Point Loma,” as the 16th such mural in a series of 100 he hopes to paint around the world.

Wyland, who says he is painting the mural free (the $15,000 in materials is being provided by the building’s owners) calls the work a gift to the city of San Diego and a salute to the 25th anniversary of Sea World.

Whale enthusiasts might question Wyland’s praise of Sea World, which some consider an enemy of killer whales, but Wyland said the aquatic park has done much to further research on whales and has opened up the world of marine life in general to children.

Describing himself as an environmentalist and naturalist, Wyland has miffed developers and politicians in several cities, including his own Laguna Beach and Honolulu, by painting murals so lavishly and on such a grand scale that critics call them traffic hazards and eyesores.

He considers it part of the “phobic opposition” to public art that seems to rear its head in every U. S. city, but strangely, he said, hardly ever in Europe.

The mural at The Plunge, which is still being painted, will be dedicated June 29. Wyland, 33, said it “depicts a pod, or family, of orcas--killer whales--off the coast of Point Loma. I paint them life-size, so the males are 30 feet long, the females 24 feet long. I’ll have eight orcas in all in the local mural. I also show a cutaway of the San Diego and Point Loma coastlines.

“My purpose is to raise public awareness about whales. . . . I consider myself as someone who’s saving whales through art.”

Wyland did his first mural in Laguna Beach in 1981, and that’s where the controversy started. He said he fought the city for two years to get the proper permits to continue his own brand of whale saving. But the outrage there was minor compared to Honolulu, where he’s convinced that the size of the project--300 feet long, 20 stories high--was too overwhelming for the locals to bear.

“When you paint on that scale in public, you tend to be controversial whether you want to be or not,” he said. “All I do is try to take ugly walls and turn them into art. Ninety percent of the people like me, but I can’t please everybody, nor should I try.”