A Red Ribbon Mural : Charity: Russ Carlton is seeking to raise $100,000 for AIDS research by getting pledges for square inches of his work along the Santa Monica Freeway.

Freeway muralist Russ Carlton is trying to change the world one square inch at a time.

That’s how the West Hollywood-based artist is selling his latest effort--a huge but intricate work on the westbound Santa Monica Freeway that will benefit a Los Angeles AIDS research group called SEARCH Alliance. At $1 per square inch, the group hopes to make at least $100,000 from the 195-by-13-foot mural, which for seven months has taken form on a retaining wall between National and Overland boulevards.

The seven-foot highway barrier will be removed to reveal the completed work by Nov. 13.

It has not been an easy time for Carlton and the handful of friends and volunteers putting the final touches on the mural, called “Unto Ye Heavenly Garden of Knowledge.” Fund raising has been slow, the highway bureaucracy even slower. Taggers have struck eight times.

The working conditions are long days in eye-stinging freeway grime. A 20-by-8-foot windowless box is both paint-storage and lunch room. A solar-heated sink and portable toilet is the only concession to comfort.

“You hear a lot of screeching brakes,” said Dave Hubbard, a writer who is Carlton’s companion and his only paid employee--for $150 a week.

Bounded by two painted red ribbons symbolizing the fight against AIDS, the mural juxtaposes curlicue images of angels, lilies, birds and an embryo with symbols of hard science--books, a microscope and the caduceus medical emblem. Carlton’s point: a cure for AIDS first requires hope.

“The answers are out there,” Carlton, 31, shouted over the thrum of passing traffic. “It’s just for us to find them.”

Carlton said some have criticized the work as “too fluffy” because it makes no overt references to AIDS besides the red ribbons. They say it would be easy to drive past the mural repeatedly without guessing what it is about. Carlton shrugs off those criticisms, saying the 260,000 motorists who pass by every day may still get his message quietly--or at least feel calmed by the pastoral imagery.

“This is the opposite approach to really in-your-face, but people will notice the red ribbons,” he said. “It’s more of a Gandhi-esque approach.”

It is Carlton’s third mural that draws attention to AIDS. His 1986 “Blue Moon Trilogy” in an overpass near the Hollywood Bowl raised more than $100,000 for AIDS Project Los Angeles. Carlton was stunned last year when a mural he had painted on the side of a West Hollywood building--to commemorate two friends who died of AIDS and to promote Project Angel Food--was painted over by the owner. As part of a subsequent settlement, Carlton said, the owner paid him $40,000.

He is now trying to round up $1 million for his next project: a 700-foot-long mural on a Hollywood Freeway ramp that would be funded in part by “selling” square inches. Carlton hopes to bus in teen-agers from all over the city as painters and, in the process, provide a shared project to students who would never meet otherwise.

“With kids and art, you can instill something in them and they can take it away. They can point at that and say, ‘I did that,’ ” he said.

Five recent high school graduates were among Carlton’s 30 helpers this summer, joining a volunteer work crew that has included his mother, Hubbard’s parents, friends, curious artists and people who had never lifted a paintbrush. One novice parlayed that experience into an apprenticeship with another muralist.

The mural is really a gigantic paint-by-numbers project. After cleaning the wall and painting a white background, Carlton and helpers traced the outlines of his drawings in thick pencil. He gave each color a number; painters had only to follow guide sheets showing how to paint each section.

Details are so fine, motorists won’t see them except in stopped traffic. But Carlton said the variety of images--including 42 separate drawings--will give drivers a new piece to discover every day.

On Wednesday, Montebello artist Ademar Matinian knelt on the pavement, dabbing fine yellow edges to an image of a burning book as an army of ants marched up the wall a few inches away. He decided to lend his days to the project after reading about it in a magazine.

“It just seemed like the right thing to do--the whole idea of AIDS awareness,” he said. “Being a part of something significant.”