Jackson, Michigan

Jackson, Michigan.

A different angle on Ben Johnston's mural. Jackson, Michigan's, Bright Walls festival, 2019.

Mural by David Rice, who oddly isn't listed as one of the artists on the Bright Walls website. The site's map gets it right, though; it's number 35 on the listing. I know this wall pretty well. The parking lot's across the street from Jackson Coffee, and I've photographed the wall a couple times. The messy brickwork remains, but it's disguised a bit by the mural. As usual, I can't find that the artist named this work. His website just describes it as a Mural for Bright Walls.

Detail from David Rice's mural for Jackson's Bright Walls. The green signs--there's one for each mural--tell who the artist is, and where he or she is from (Portland, Oregon, in this case).

Another detail from David Rice's mural at Bright Walls Jackson. In truth this is more a photo of Rice's work surface than of his work, though I like and admire the painting I've captured here. Age has made the brickwork at the bottom of the wall ragged. Higher up the wall's less difficult, but hardly a consistent surface.

One last detail photo from the mural David Rice created for Bright Walls Jackson--a butterfly, and the artist's signature.

This is what the wall I showed yesterday looks like now--windows for the lofts, a power cabinet, and five glorious new Bright Walls murals. We'll look at those over the next few days.

Evidently they were spindly folks. The car's a Kaiser-Darrin , of which only 435 examples were built, all in Jackson, all in 1954. Looks like you could buy one today for less than $70,000 . Artist Tyler Voorhees discusses the car, the painting, and Bright Walls at some length in a blog post . It's worth reading. ========== I slapped a wide-angle lens on the camera to take this photo, then straightened out the resulting distortions. Which creates a different set of distortions. Bright Walls photographer Owley offers a different perspective .

I can't find much about this mural, but I can say that Michael Polakowski and Sheila Nicolin are both Detroit-based, are graduates of the College for Creative Studies , and have worked together before . Both artists have photos of this mural on their Instagram accounts, but all either says about it is "Bright Walls." From their other work I'd guess that Sheila's primarily responsible for the person in the foreground and Michael designed the background--but I'm certain things aren't that simple. It's a fine mural. ========== Here we have a curiosity. According to this page of the Bright Walls website, this mural was painted by Polakowski and Nicolin, but according to this map that wall was painted by Jesse Kassel. It gets worse: Bright Walls spells Nicolin's first name two different ways on these pages. It could be the Bright Walls website needed a proofreader.