A Line in the Paint

For M.B. Hanrahan, there is nothing quite as frustrating as a large, looming, preposterously pristine wall.

“I see a wall like that and I go, ‘Hmmmmm,’ ” she said. “I go over to it, I touch it, I measure it, I get a feel for it. A blank wall is an empty canvas--something just needs to be there.”

That’s why Hanrahan has accepted commissions to paint wall after wall in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, leaving murals in her wake that either adorn the landscape or afflict it, depending on your point of view.

Her admirers call her passionate and disciplined, a woman committed to bringing art before the public. Her detractors say they’ve enjoyed about as much art as they can stand.

“It’s ugly!” moaned Tony Touma, the owner of Avenue Liquor in Ventura. “I’m an American and I’m a businessman, and I don’t care for either her or her mural.”

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Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered that Touma and his partner, Kamil Yousef, pay Hanrahan nearly $50,000 in damages. Their offense: whitewashing about one-third of a colorful, 72-foot-long anti-drug, anti-alcohol mural that the previous store owner had allowed Hanrahan to paint on the side of his store.

Citing community opposition to the mural, Touma has vowed to appeal and says he won’t pay Hanrahan a cent.

Citing community support of the mural, Hanrahan has vowed to repaint it.

Brandishing an injunction from U.S. District Judge Richard A. Paez, she started to do so last week. Touma responded by angrily trying to whisk away Hanrahan’s chalk outlines with a broom and promising to once again obliterate her work.

It’s not the first time Hanrahan has rattled cages, although she has never before made a federal case of it.

“She’s not all show, but she’s not afraid to shock people or at least surprise them,” said Robin Dunitz, author of two books on Southern California murals. “She kind of exudes art.”

Hanrahan, 39, wears flannel shirts, paint-flecked jeans and lots of rings, including a skull-and-crossbones gold earring.

Last week, her short-cropped hair was white with an inky-blue splotch up front.

At the hands of a stylist named Augie, her hair color changes frequently and without benefit of her direction.

“I just sit there and I’m his canvas,” she said. “There’s no reason for me to look any certain way. I can have green hair when I go to work. I can have no hair, for that matter.”

As Hanrahan warms to her subject, her speech quickens with staccato enthusiasm.

She has worked in many mediums. She paints, she takes photographs, she has a master’s degree in sculpture from Humboldt State, and she designed props for the movie version of “The Flintstones.”

For the last few years, she has sent friends assertively un-Hallmark, limited-edition holiday postcards: M.B. sitting naked in a pumpkin patch with a jack-o’-lantern on her head. A topless M.B. draped in a flowing American flag. M.B.’s torso slathered with pink icing and inscribed with the saying “Life is a piece of cake!”

But human pastry is merely fun, while walls are wholly passion.

Mary Beth Hanrahan’s fascination with them started early.

Daughter of Jack Hanrahan, a comedy writer who contributed to Mad magazine and helped create “Laugh-In,” “Get Smart” and other TV shows, Hanrahan grew up in the San Fernando Valley.

At 15, she painted a large record album cover and a shining star popping out of a midnight-blue background on her bedroom walls.

Then she did her boyfriend’s walls.

At 27--after studies at UC Santa Cruz and Humboldt State and the usual assortment of artist’s odd jobs--she found herself back in the San Fernando Valley, once again painting walls.

“I was doing store windows at the same mall where I’d hung out as a teenager,” she recalled. “We’d be painting a background and I’d say, ‘Why not do a mountain? What about a full-on “Phantom of the Opera”?’ That’s really how I got to be a muralist.”

Nature of Work Is Transitory

Ten years ago, after a stint as a foundry worker, Hanrahan landed at the quirky collective called Art City in Ventura. Not long after, she started leaving her distinctive mark on walls all over town.

Nicholby’s nightclub boasts scenes of Chicago in the 1940s, courtesy of Hanrahan. Wild Planet, a store featuring T-shirts and posters and New Age gewgaws, bears the artist’s 38-foot smoke-breathing lizard and neon-green doorway.

The Livery arts center, Natalie’s Fine Threads, the Barefoot Bistro, Cafe Bella, a grocery in Saticoy, a fish market at Channel Islands Harbor, a fabric store in Commerce, the Westin South Coast Hotel in Newport Beach and homes from Malibu to San Francisco all have the vibrant, oversized Hanrahan touch.

“Oh, my God, it totally brings in business,” said clerk Jeff Burroughs at Wild Planet, whose flamboyant facade initially angered city officials. “People see it and they’re all, like, ‘That’s wild--let’s go in there!’ ”

Hanrahan’s colorful shadow has fallen on local schools too. Directing students, she has created murals at Poinsettia, Blanche Reynolds, E.P. Foster and other schools. Trudy Arriaga, the departing principal at Sheridan Way Elementary School, was so taken with Hanrahan’s mural there that teachers have commissioned a smaller painting of it as a going-away gift.

In 1994, Hanrahan and artist Michael Mora won a grant for a mural based on the history of Tortilla Flats, a Ventura neighborhood razed when Highway 101 roared through in the 1970s. Grants also came her way to work with kids on an anti-tobacco mural in Oxnard’s poorest neighborhood, and with local mental patients and youthful offenders on murals elsewhere.

“She has a mission to get that work out there,” said Paul Lindhard, the sculptor who founded Art City.

Even so, Hanrahan, who also teaches art at Ventura College, says she has no illusions about her work’s permanence.

For one thing, the law does not protect murals commissioned by businesses as stringently as it does noncommercial art. For instance, Hanrahan’s murals for the clothing store Ooga Booga crumbled when the downtown Ventura store was leveled for the movie theaters now under construction. Others have been painted over.

“I tell people, ‘If you don’t want your work to be transitory, don’t do murals.’ Unless they’re in someplace sanctified, or unless maybe you’re [the renowned late Mexican muralist] Diego Rivera, they’ll be destroyed.”

But then there’s “Don’t Target Our Kids”--the in-your-face mural that has raised blood pressure on both sides of the counter at Touma’s Avenue Liquor.

“When we were doing it out there, I didn’t hear one complaint,” Hanrahan said. “Then, after it was done, it was, ‘Ugh, I hate it!’ ”

Some 300 Avenue residents--many of them teenagers--had pitched in on the mural. The painting was funded by a county drug and alcohol program. It took Hanrahan a total of about a month, for which she earned $1,000.

The profit wasn’t much, but Hanrahan, who kicked a drug habit herself, is a big believer in the mural’s message: Companies shouldn’t profit by selling booze and cigarettes to children. Or, as the mural said before part of it was eliminated, “It’s not cool to target kids.”

The piece--a raucous collage featuring anti-booze slogans and gangsters burning their guns amid rainbows and sunshine--was strident. However, it stood in relative calm for three years. It even helped inspire a group of neighbors to clean up the trash-strewn city lot in front of it, creating a small poppy-dotted park.

“It cut down graffiti, and that’s mainly why I let them do it,” said Ray Ramirez, the owner of the building and, at the time, the owner of the business inside it.

By focusing more attention on the site, the mural also cut the number of panhandlers and winos who would hang out in the lot, Ramirez said.

“It really was beneficial,” he said.

New Owners Have Different Taste

However, rockier times were ahead. Ramirez kept the building but sold the business in July 1997. Almost immediately, the new owners talked of wiping out the mural, which they believed was driving customers away. Getting wind of the plan from a neighbor, Hanrahan asked them to reconsider.

When they obliterated a portion of the work, her attorney, Robert Rootenberg, of Los Angeles, also got into the act.

“I tried to explain over and over that we didn’t want to sue them,” he said. “We just wanted to get the mural put back. But they said, ‘This is America and we can do what we want.’ ”

The American system didn’t work as the liquor store partners, Syrian immigrants, had hoped.

“I didn’t want to sue,” Hanrahan said. “Like I have time for a suit? I could have been making $500 a day kickin’ it in Beverly Hills, painting flowers in someone’s kid’s bedroom. But we had to draw a line.”

Citing a federal law called the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, Hanrahan argued that the store owners had no right to cover over her work. The judge agreed that the mural had “recognized stature,” pointing to its inclusion both in a book and in a display of public art in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Legal Protection for Artworks

Under the law, artwork of “recognized stature” cannot be destroyed without the artist’s consent, said Robert C. Lind, a specialist in art law who teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. Once the artist dies, a California statute offers possible protection of the work for another 50 years or until the elements destroy it, Lind said. However, that scenario has not yet been tested. The judge’s verdict for Hanrahan upset not only the store’s owners but also residents who objected to the notion of property rights taking a back seat to art.

“My concern is with the audaciousness and arrogance of the federal judge,” said Marvin Miller, a naval engineer who lives in Oxnard. “Who is he to say this is art? I had a piece of my engineering work put up in the House of Representatives, but that doesn’t make me Thomas Edison.”

On the other hand, Hanrahan also has numerous admirers. As she sketched outlines on the whitewashed mural last week, a knot of neighborhood people stopped to cheer her on.

“I’m totally stoked,” said Junior Garcia, a retired stagehand who works with local youth. “This thing really brought the neighborhood together.”

As for Hanrahan, she’s not surprised that some people don’t like her efforts.

“They don’t have to like it,” she said. “The freeway demolished the Tortilla Flats neighborhood, but I don’t boycott the freeway. Some people have strong feelings [against] Father [Junipero] Serra, but I’m not going down to City Hall to put a clown mask on his statue.

“One just has to say, ‘I don’t like it--but I don’t have to like something to appreciate it.’ It’s a big enough world to hold all this stuff.”