Public Art
Part of living in a small town is getting called upon to participate in public activities. When we moved to Oriental, North Carolina (population 850), we allied ourselves with a group of artists and earned reputations as people who could be pressed into making posters for the local theatre group, designing and painting scenery, working on public projects of every description.
The Town Dragon
Our crowning achievement was remaking the town’s dragon. The town of Oriental has an annual New Year’s eve parade, led by The Town Dragon. When we first arrive, the Dragon consisted of a cardboard box covered with glitter and about twelve yards of cloth. The local historian, who was designated as Dragon Keeper, asked Charles and me if we’d refurbish the Dragon in time for the New Year’s celebration. We agreed, but stipulated that we would recreate, rather than refurbish, the town’s mascot.
This is what our new and improved dragon looked like:
We got two wonderful engineers to help us (Tom Lathrop and George Madgwick) and the four of us created smoke-breathing Dragon with blinking eyes and a lolling tongue.
Summer Dragon
Some years later, we created a second dragon, called The Summer Dragon, which appears in the Croaker Festival parade on Independence Day weekend.
The Summer Dragon neither belches smoke nor blinks its eyes, but it’s nevertheless colorful and lovable. It is also considerably easier to carry.
Garage Door Dragon
Continuing on with the dragon motif, we painted a mural on the garage door of a local business. The man who commissioned the mural liked the goofy looking aspect of the dragon’s face:
Theatre Murals
The next project we were asked to do was create a mural for the inside of the Pelican Players theatre. The murals were to be for a special production, celebrating local characters in local history, written by a local author. We were asked to work in chalk on cinder block walls (gadzooks!) and to create a montage of buildings around town. We were given the walls on either side of the stage to use for this project. On the stage, we were asked to design and execute another mural in chalk, one that could either represent a desk in a judges chamber or, if I remember correctly, a kitchen. In other words, the mural that functioned as a set had to be ambiguous enough to suggest either of these two locales. We were told that the murals would be washed away or painted over after the production ran its two weeks.
Given that we were working in pastel chalk on a very rough surface and given that we were told to strive for a primitive look, we were surprised at the results. The murals had a ghostly, floating quality to them. During the performances, when the lights were low, the murals had the pale shimmer of glow worms; when the lights were up, at the beginning and end of the performance, they resembled suede.
So here are photos of the murals, far more brightly lit than anyone other than Charles and I ever saw them. Their flaws are more visible as a result of the spot lights and the flash, so squint your eyes and try to imagine them in a darkened auditorium:
Incidentally, the murals at the side of the stage were not destroyed after the performances ran their course. They remained on the wall for more than a year but were finally obliterated due to the instability of the chalk as an artistic medium.
Pamlico Democratic Women’s Float
During our last summer in Oriental, the local Democratic Women’s Club pressed us to create a styrofoam donkey for their Croaker Fest unit. We obliged them with the critter below:
