Aerospace Museum of California
Adaptation: transforming an older mural for a new amazing space.
Amelia & Friends, Hilton Hotel, Oakland, 1991
In a Hilton Hotel near the Oakland Airport at a restaurant called “Amelia’s,” a tiny, yellow toy plane hung in the doorway, the only reference to the pioneer aviator. This was amazing because she, like so many others, had flown in and out of Oakland.
As usual, clients left me to decide how I wanted to spend their money. Often, my efforts far exceed what was budgeted because that’s what I must do. I decided that I had to create life-sized portraits of the pioneers of aviation who had flown in California between 1920 and 1940.
I wanted to reincarnate them, gathering them all together for the first time, as if they were sitting just outside a window, looking into the restaurant from the tarmac. There was no one source for this effort. This became an obsession and I spent more than six months traveling up and down California doing research.
First, I had to find out who had flown in California during that time. Next, I had to pick who I thought were the most significant, most interesting characters. This was subjective on my part, but it required that I do a lot of reading and spend a lot of time talking to museum curators and other scholars. I formed a temporary friendship with one of Amelia’s biographers, Carol Osborne.
I found and met a man who claimed to be her last “official” photographer, the elegant Albert Bresnick. He gave me a portrait of her, signed by him. He also said that he thought Earhart might have been pregnant on that last flight.
Earhart was only one of thirty that I eventually portrayed, including Charles and Anne Lindbergh and Wiley Post and a surprising number of female heroes. What happened to those amazing women during and after World War Two? That’s another essay.
My studio was a 4,000 square foot concrete tilt-up that was searing in the summer and freezing in the winter. It was so large that I often rolled around on my skates. On the longest wall, I had stretched and primed a single piece of canvas, 5’ high by 35’ long. Primed canvas is always so beautiful, pristine and pure that I’m often reluctant to destroy its pristine purity with a painting. This canvas sat vacant for several weeks as I finished my research and finalized sketches. I kept finding fascinating bits of information and it was hard to limit the number of pilots so I could fit them all in, constrained by the size of the client’s walls. Finally, the day arrived when I was to actually start drawing the images on the canvas.
I set up the projector, arranged the transparent line drawings on the screen and turned out the lights. The projector casts an eerie in such a silent, cavernous space. Literally, at the moment I started to draw, a news flash came over the radio announcing that a relic, the sole of a shoe, that might have belonged to Earhart had just been found. I froze, shocked at the coincidence of the timing. I thought that perhaps there was a reason I had chosen this project and to this day, I still wonder.
More about the back story of the original mural.
