Murals Let Kids Leave a Mark on Local Art

By most people’s standards, the long wall next to the alley where Victory Boulevard and the Hollywood Freeway meet is a sight that lacerates the eye, a graffiti nightmare. To muralist Tim Fields, it’s a huge canvas waiting to be filled with silhouettes of kids clutching multicolored balloons on a sky-blue background.

Take a look around any of the forgotten corners of Los Angeles, from downtown to the northern end of the Valley, and you’re bound to bump into one of Fields’ murals. East Los Angeles’ Ramona Gardens housing project boasts one, and so does North Hollywood’s Valley Community Clinic.

Although each mural represents the vision of those who commission the works, what the works have in common is the input of children, who have left their brush strokes on each one.

“The kids put symbols on the murals that speak to them,” Fields, 34, said. “The fun is in finding a spot for a 3-year-old to slap the paint around. I show the kids how to paint an elephant, and half an hour later it’s done.”

Well, it takes a little longer than that. But not much. Typically, Fields receives a call from a community service organization such as LA Works or the Valley’s Halcyon Center for Child Studies requesting that he design a mural for a school auditorium or the wall of a neighborhood building that taggers have claimed.

With city permits in hand, as well as paints and brushes donated from local stores or a Rotary Club, Fields sketches the scene on the wall, then the volunteers--under his direction--fill in the pictures on the enormous outdoor canvases.

“Tim is absolutely masterful,” said the Halcyon Center’s Gloria Gold. “He tells the kids how to shade and get perspective. He makes it fun and educational to participate in something that will be there forever.”

Rio Vista School Principal Judy Franks agrees.

“It was wonderful working together and watching it take shape,” she said of Fields’ mural that transformed the back wall of the North Hollywood school’s auditorium into a virtual Eden last May.

“We got to get all messy,” 9-year-old Attila Gyore said. “I loved the way our [auditorium] door turned into a trellis.”

Fields knows what kids love. His interest in drawing dates to his own childhood, when he spent hours tracing comic book characters. At Illinois State University, the Chicago native attracted attention for his works, with their vivid colors and playful themes.

Fields arrived in Los Angeles in 1986, where he quickly became known as the “Boulevard Da Vinci” for the celebrity-oriented murals he painted on a number of Hollywood Boulevard storefronts.

Occasional acting jobs and his work as a caricaturist for a television studio have helped support the artist, whose greatest pleasure he said comes from his mural work with kids.

Fields organized his first group project in 1991 at the Los Angeles Youth Network, a shelter for teenage runaways in Hollywood. That success was followed by the Challengers’ Boys & Girls Club mural in South-Central Los Angeles in 1996. He has now completed about 40 murals citywide.

“The kids and I are like the comic-book Challengers, doing something that has never been done before,” Fields said. “It’s amazing to have these kids work with me. It’s like having 75 helping hands.”

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