The quartet of artists with local roots working with artist Erik Sandgren on a Nirvana mural are improvising new sketches as they riff on how elements will look in the final 5 foot by 50 foot production planned for the exterior wall of a building in downtown Aberdeen.
Ideas are flowing through email as Sandgren, who was commissioned to create the mural by the civic group Our Aberdeen, collaborates with four of his former art students at Grays Harbor College. Sandgren likened the way they are working through email to the way musicians contribute individual licks to a new composition. He said he has been inspired to do so by Nirvana and by watching his daughter jam with musicians.
The Nirvana mural aims to create a sense of Aberdeen in the period when Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic banded together to form what became the record-shattering band that made grunge rock famous around the world. “This mural is about the place it began,” Sandgren said. Nirvana is to be inducted to the Rock &Roll Hall of Fame in April.
Our Aberdeen is still in negotiations about which building is destined for the mural.
Sandgren delivered a few new sketches last week and mused about each artist’s contributions to the draft efforts. “It’s a joy to work with people you don’t have to say things twice to,” he said.
Dominic Senibaldi of Indianapolis, Ind., contributed stylized portraits, one of Cobain smoking and sporting sunglasses that look more like goggles, flanked by mac and cheese (a Cobain favorite) and an MTV logo. Another shows Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, surrounded by crowd surfers and a television with the MTV astronaut logo.
A third Senibaldi sketch is inspired by an idea contributed by bassist Novoselic himself, “about depicting the child Cobain in contrast to later incarnations,” Sandgren recounted in a lengthy email between the artists. In the draft, a baby Cobain is crowd surfing above a sea of mac and cheese, the audience and the words “Nevermind” and “In Utero.”
In what Sandgren calls “spatial inventions,” by Anthony James Cotham of Buffalo, N.Y., Cotham envisions a vacant space in the center where the ghostly pale silhouette of a solo figure of Cobain is facing away toward the audience. The lead singer is also shown doubled over, playing guitar, hair flopped down, face hidden, a mystery.
The sketches burst free of the perimeters in several spots, “true to some of the transgressive qualities in the music itself,” Sandgren said.
He suggested adding a 4 to 5 inch border with the text of band names important to the nascent Nirvana: MudHoney, Fitz of Depression, Sonic Youth, Screaming Trees, Pixies and the Melvins among others. He’d like to hear from Novoselic about which bands to include.
Jason Sobottka, of DuPont, added to Sandgren’s intention to intersperse color in a matrix of black, white and gray. Sobottka suggested “letting the color happen where the music is played” against the city and landscapes in shades of gray, black and white, Sandgren said. “As an artist, I like having rules I can break,” Sandgren wrote the four.
Sobottka also “delightfully complicated my original idea of ‘tagging’ our own work at the end by suggesting we tag the panels at the beginning,” Sandgren noted.
David Wall of Olympia, who has collaborated with Sandgren before, is researching the compatibility of types of paint on the panels. “I envision a mix of brushed areas with free-form spray paint and stencil applications … some elements crisp and clear, others painterly and rough,” Sandgren noted.
He wants to see the mural remain fluid, loose and formative for as long as possible. Then the team will congregate in Aberdeen from June 10 through July 8, to “knock it off in one go” in the muralists’ equivalent of one take, he said.
He envisions a mural that will resonate in multiple ways, some aspects immediately visible, others so rich in detail they will require time and binoculars to savor.
Erin Hart, 360-537-3932, ehart@thedailyworld.com. Twitter: @DW_Erin
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