Art and Politics Mix to Celebrate Legislature’s Rescue of Pool Mural

Artists and politicos mixed Tuesday at a pool side bash to celebrate the Legislature’s decision to rescue a hip hotel’s underwater mural from swimming safety laws requiring pool bottoms to be solid white.

New York artist Francis Forlenza, who painted an “aquamural” full of colors and curlicues for Chip Conley, owner of San Francisco’s Phoenix Inn, said the salvation of his work represents a victory for art and a defeat for fuddy-duddies the world over.

“A lot of people think art can only be on a four-by-four canvas in an art gallery,” the 32-year-old painter said. “Little kids don’t want to go to an art gallery, but they see art this way. It’s fun.”

The Phoenix Inn’s 45-foot egg-shaped swimming hole, which sports pale-blue “stylized waves” that look like sixes and nines on a navy blue base, became the second pool in the state to be exempted from the law. California lawmakers in 1988 spared a pool painting done by British artist David Hockney at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), who whisked the exemption bill through the Legislature, and San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos were among about 200 supporters of the Phoenix Inn underwater mural who attended the evening pool party.

Innkeeper Conley said he staged the soiree to celebrate what he once thought was a lost cause. He didn’t know about the state law mandating white pool bottoms when he commissioned Forlenza in January to paint the pool at his 44-room motel. The underwater Pop Art was to be the finishing touch in Conley’s transformation of a once-seedy motel into a trendy inn now frequented by such pop stars as Tracy Chapman, Sinead O’Connor and Linda Ronstadt.

“I was almost sure that we were going to have to paint it over,” said Conley, who avoided trouble with the law by briefly closing the pool to swimmers this spring until San Francisco Supervisor Terence Hallinan, Agnos and Brown pledged to fight to save Forlenza’s painting, titled “My Fifteen Minutes/Tumbling Waves.”