SHERMAN OAKS : Artist Turns Spotlight on Rain Forests

Whether the subject is Vietnam veterans, animal rights or the rain forest, Hollywood artist Peter Stewart said his murals have but one aim:

“I want to make people aware,” the 38-year-old Vietnam veteran said Tuesday, standing in front of his most recent work, a giant mural verdantly depicting a scene in the Amazon rain forest. Lizards, leopards, toucans and macaws inhabit the 360-foot mural that is also adorned with mist-shrouded waterfalls and dangling palm fronds.

Covering nearly 6,000 square feet of wall outside the Amazon Bar and Grill in Sherman Oaks, Stewart said the mural’s brilliant colors and lush settings are intended to entrance viewers with the rain forest’s beauty, while a “fact sheet” included in the painting informs them of its impending destruction.

Atossa Soltani, Southern California director for the nonprofit environmental group Rainforest Action Network, arranged for Stewart to paint the mural outside the eatery at 14649 Ventura Blvd. “I think people who are out here waiting for their cars are going to get a good dose of rain forest facts,” Soltani said, pointing to the “fact sheet” in the restaurant’s parking lot, which warns, among other things, that 48 species become extinct in the rain forest each day.

“Some people might say, ‘Oh this is just a gimmick,’ ” said restaurant owner Tony Colagreco. “But it’s not. There’s not a day when I don’t wake up thinking about the rain forest.”

Colagreco said that he has given Rainforest Action Network stock in Amazon Bar and Grill in Santa Monica and that the group will also receive donations from the Sherman Oaks location.

Using only 25 gallons of watered down paint, it took Stewart a month to complete the project, for which he was paid $3,500.

“It didn’t pay a lot--I had to suffer for a month,” he said, surveying his work. ‘But this is something I really wanted to do.”

In addition to the Sherman Oaks mural, Stewart has painted several banners for RAN, including one at the Mitsubishi building in downtown Los Angeles protesting the company’s harvesting of Canadian forests, and another opposing the import of tropical timber, that was draped from a ship in Long Beach Harbor. In June, 1992, he finished a block-long mural in Venice dedicated to POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War.

Unemployed and broke when he returned from Vietnam in 1974, Stewart said he began painting murals by accident.

“I got this job painting houses,” he said. “And one thing led to another.”