Mural’s Goal Is to Plant Ideas

Michael Gold’s mural is making him sick, and he’s worried that it will have the same effect on his North Hollywood neighbors.

Gold wants to educate people about the state of the environment, so he is having a colorful, six-part mural painted on the outside of his Riverton Avenue clothing factory. But a stark scene depicting a clear-cut forest littered with tree carcasses turned out to be so powerful that Gold said he stayed in bed for four days after it was completed recently.

“I was so depressed,” Gold said. “Now, I feel guilty. I figure I’ll go outside someday and there will be people hanging from the trees, a rash of suicides on Riverton.”

Composed of five panels, including the clear-cutting scene, the mural colorfully zigzags around the factory. In one, neon-orange walruses cavort in a purple sea. In another, an Indonesian medicine man crowned with red flowers performs a ceremony to heal the soul of the sick Earth. One wall is still blank because Gold is having trouble coming up with a scene that offers a solution to the world’s environmental problems.

Gold, a self-described “ ‘60s person” with shoulder-length, graying hair and a beard, said he was delighted to find that Hector (Hex) Rios, the 22-year-old graffiti artist he hired, uses aerosol paints that do not release fluorocarbons into the air.

Rios, whom Gold paid $6,400, has painted elaborate murals in Los Angeles without permission since he was 11. Although some people regard graffiti as urban pollution, Rios said he is not being hypocritical by painting the environmental mural.

“I’m not out to tag or destroy, to put my name around the city a thousand million times like many people I know,” Rios said. “I use it to make people think.”

No armchair environmentalist himself, Gold does more than commission murals. He and a partner manufacture all-cotton clothing because they deplore synthetic fabrics. Gold plans to transform a sandy field in front of the factory into a huge vegetable garden.

And in oil-rich northwestern New Mexico, where he owns an 800-acre summer camp, Gold has waged a 20-year battle to protect the environment, said his attorney, Grove T. Burnett.

Gold has succeeded in getting one oil company to soundproof a noisy propane-gas processing plant and another to agree to reforest 650 trees it ripped out to drill a well, Burnett said.

Recently, Gold filed a case that he hopes will force oil companies to conduct more thorough environmental studies before drilling for oil or gas on land leased from the federal government, Burnett said.

“He is an environmentalist to the core--his heart is really there, he’s totally committed,” Burnett said.

Gold said he will be satisfied if the mural inspires only one person to clean up the environment.