Muralist Asks City to Pay for Whiteout

Before they disappeared, they were four of the most engaging faces in Los Angeles.

There was the middle-aged man in glasses--solid, direct, slightly authoritarian as he looked you right in the eye. Opposite was his wife--eyebrows arched over a gentle, worried smile.

There was a younger man, dark and intense, staring across the street--directly into the pretty, passive face of his wife.

For four years, they brightened the gloomy Sunset Boulevard underpass in Echo Park with such a glow of personality that they landed on the cover of the book “L.A. Wall Art.”

The faces disappeared earlier this year when a contractor visited the underpass as part of an assignment to eradicate graffiti on city property. When the job was done, white paint covered the wall.

The former gang member who painted the faces is locked in a tug of war with the city over who should be responsible when the government destroys a work of art.

The artist, 29-year-old electrician Ruben Brucelyn, is not seeking compensation for loss of the mural--merely to be reimbursed for his costs so he can repaint the work, which he created with private donations under the guidance of Los Angeles muralist Kent Twitchell.

Brucelyn has presented the city’s Bureau of Street Maintenance an invoice for $2,500 to cover paint and supplies.

Although conceding that it was probably a mistake to paint over the mural, city officials have so far ignored the request. The burden falls on muralists to remove graffiti from their works if they don’t want the city involved, according to Curtis Bianchi, general superintendent in the Bureau of Street Maintenance.

Graffiti “must be taken care of very quickly or it’s just like an explosion happens,” Bianchi said.

He said the crew that painted over Brucelyn’s mural was acting under a policy calling for the removal of graffiti from city property within 48 hours. The city retains a private contractor, Graffiti Prevention Systems, to patrol public structures.

The dispute dates to Jan. 8, when a crew was sent to the Sunset bridge, which crosses heavily traveled Glendale Boulevard.

“We’ve found that there are what I would consider to be unauthorized murals throughout the city,” Bianchi said. “Many have been painted over.”

It turned out that Brucelyn’s 1985 work was not unauthorized. He had received approval of the design from the city’s Cultural Affairs Department and had personally kept it free of graffiti for three years. He said he had applied a protective coating and only needed to rub the graffiti off with solvent and touch up the paint underneath.

Brucelyn said he arrived on the scene just as workers were burying the faces under swaths of white paint. He protested, but they continued, he said.

“I was crushed, devastated,” the artist said in a letter of complaint to Bianchi.

Last month, he asked for funds to repaint the faces. If necessary, he will file a formal claim against the city, he said.

The mural had more significance to Brucelyn and Echo Park than the commuter passing through the tunnel could have guessed. The faces were based on real people--the younger man being Brucelyn himself. The others are those who helped him escape gang life.

The older man in the mural was based on Harold Helms, pastor of Angelus Temple, the white domed church beside Echo Park Lake. He runs a Spanish-language ministry and outreach programs for gang members.

“He used to be a real bona fide tough gang kid,” muralist Twitchell said of Brucelyn. “He met his wife who was a Christian, a smart, savvy young woman. He began going to church with her. It changed his life into a positive life.”

Twitchell also had a role in the turnaround. The two met in 1984, when Brucelyn stopped on the Harbor Freeway to watch Twitchell work on the faces he was commissioned to paint on freeway walls for the Olympic Games.

Twitchell created the stencil-like forms for the young electrician’s first murals, the Olympic runners on the stairway west of Echo Park Lake.

Brucelyn took a detour from his art projects in 1988 to write and produce a play, “Smile Now, Cry Later,” depicting the ravages of the gang culture. Last year, he rebuilt his house in Eagle Rock.

With all that going on, he admitted, he neglected the faces mural during 1989.

At the least, Brucelyn said, the city should have warned him of its intentions before destroying his work.

Bianchi said the contractor had no way of finding Brucelyn because he did not apply for permits to paint on city property. “We don’t know who the artist is. We have no permit. We have no record,” Bianchi said.

To prevent such mishaps in the future, Bianchi said he will propose permit guidelines so that anyone who comes to City Hall with a mural proposal can be given a package listing the steps to be taken.

Meanwhile, Twitchell has some advice for his protege.

“I’d stay away from underpasses,” Twitchell said. “You can’t win the fight against destruction. A creator can’t win a fight against a destroyer.”