PROFILE : M.B. Takes Her Walls by Storm

M.B. Hanrahan has done a lot of work recently. She’s made a little money, become a dominant figure on the Ventura art scene and just about single-handedly muralized downtown Ventura.

What’s her secret?

“M.B. gets up earlier and goes to bed later than anyone I know,” says her manager, Linda Lou Bouche of HK Management in Beverly Hills. “She’s the most driven person I know.”

But M.B. (Mary Beth) Hanrahan evaluates her own success quite differently.

“I have learned to listen to what people are hearing in their own heads,” she explains, in her characteristic rapid-fire delivery. “This enables me to speak to them in words and images they can understand.”

Her track record attests to this. Hanrahan has forged relationships with all kinds of people: with California Youth Authority juvenile offenders, with the mentally disabled clients of the Turning Point Foundation, with art bureaucrats, with politicians. Her art is collaborative and public--it’s about communication.

“She’s not afraid to try anything. She’s experimental. There’s nothing M.B. won’t take on,” says partner Michelle Chapin.

Hanrahan says she has finally got the money part together, too.

“I understand now that the game of getting people to pay for the art is definitely my art form,” she says.

Hanrahan has done individual murals in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, the City of Commerce and Woodland Hills, but in Ventura she has done more than a half dozen. Between murals she has kept up steady production of paintings and other work. Her next show will be in March at EZTV Cyberspace Gallery (a collaboration with sTeVe Knauf in Los Angeles).

Hanrahan’s murals are bright and kaleidoscopic. One reviewer called them “dizzy with color and motion.”

A walking tour of them could start at the Livery (34 N. Palm St.), where Hanrahan was the supervising artist on the Livery Mural. Then to Wild Planet (576 E. Main St.), where she did the controversial chartreuse facade and the 38-foot lizard on the ceiling within.

There would also be stops at Ladies and Gentlemen (477 E. Main St., decorative entrance), Aguilar’s restaurant (278 E. Main St., murals) the Kitchen Cafe in the Livery (a mural).

There’s a wire topiary (which needs replanting) in the Livery courtyard, and murals at Company Rags (301 E. Main St., note purple cow on ceiling) and the Sheridan Way School (the cafeteria has nine big dolphins, but don’t miss the principal’s outer and inner office--they’re covered with dolphins and seascapes).

“We needed a mural for our school,” says Trudy Arriaga of Sheridan Way school, which is not far from downtown Ventura. “It was a matter of school pride for us. And M.B. came and painted dolphins on our walls for us. The kids all know that M.B. came and painted dolphins on our walls for us. The kids all know that M.B. Hanrahan did this for them.”

M.B. Hanrahan, 34, is herself a work of art. She has a strong eyebrow line over steady blue-gray eyes, and these days her hair is short-cut burgundy.

“Life is for living,” she says. “Hair is for dying.” No matter--she’s planning to shave it for her party, to unveil her “true roots.”

Marla Burg, who teaches art at Ventura College, calls her one of the top life models around.

“Some people you can draw, some you can’t,” explains Burg. “Some suck all the energy to themselves so you can hardly draw them. M.B. radiates energy. She’s extraordinarily focused and energetic even when she’s not moving. She holds a pose so exactly that the drawing practically draws itself.”

And she can talk. She is a fast-speaking woman. Words and ideas pour forth incessantly. She was once a disc jockey and loved it. She’d probably still be there if they hadn’t changed the format and fired everyone.

“We’re a family of speakers,” she says. “That’s what we do. We speak.”

Hanrahan grew up in Cleveland and the San Fernando Valley. Her father was a TV writer (“Get Smart,” “Laugh In”). It was always assumed in her family that M.B. would be an artist. Exactly what kind of artist she was to be was never quite clear.

And it still isn’t. Hanrahan has been called a video artist, a fabric artist, a public artist and, now, a muralist.

“I can ride that for awhile,” she says. “I don’t mind. I don’t naturally paint small paintings anyway. My mother still asks me why my work isn’t in museums.”

After getting her M.A. in sculpture at Humboldt State in 1983, Hanrahan lived in Phoenix and went through a period she calls “Painting for Dollars.” She’d fill her car with paintings, drive to L.A., and not return home until the car was empty.

She worked as a monotype printer, a graphic artist, a free-lance photographer, a production assistant, a foundry assistant. And she wasn’t going to die without singing, so she had her own band for a while. Punk, of course.

“My poetry wasn’t that good,” says Hanrahan. “But it was good enough to scream.”

The last stop before arriving at Ventura’s Art City, an artists collective and sculpture supply depot, in 1988 was a stint at Drulu Design in West Hollywood doing props, sets, backdrops.

“She’s a wild person who does things her own way,” says Andrew Binder, head of Drulu. She will be very successful. Of course, she’s got to get out of Ventura--hasn’t she painted all the walls yet?”

Not quite. There’s still a wall left in Ventura that Hanrahan wants. It’s the biggest wall downtown: the 85-foot freeway-facing wall of the Ventura Theatre.

“It’s a weird wall,” she says. “It disappears, you don’t see it, then all of a sudden you see it again. I think it would be neat to have a mermaid staring straight out at you holding a bunch of poinsettias, like a giant siren, beckoning. . . .”