Larger than life

Oaks Bottom mural may end up largest in U.S.

By Anne Marie DiStefano

The Portland Tribune, May 14, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

ANNI TRACY / TRIBUNE PHOTO

The mural being painted on the walls of the Wilhelm Portland Memorial Mausoleum overlooking the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge will portray dozens of birds that inhabit the refuge.

It could be the world’s largest bird watching guide. When it’s finished later this summer, the mural in progress on the south- and west-facing walls of the Wilhelm Portland Memorial Mausoleum will cover more than 43,000 square feet. Its creators believe that it’s the largest hand-painted mural in the United States.

The mural overlooks the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and will portray dozens of birds that inhabit the refuge. Already complete is a 40-foot osprey, big enough to carry off a full-grown man. There’s a flock of ducks the size of flying horses. A great blue heron — the official bird of the city of Portland — towers 65 feet over the marshy, forested lowlands.

Mike Houck, a longtime Portland activist, spearheaded the project.

“We’ve got to give him all the credit for facilitating this,” says David Shroeder, the chief executive officer of Wilhelm Portland Memorial.

Houck has been involved with Oaks Bottom since the 1970s when, as a graduate student, he worked to protect the wetlands in Southeast Portland, which the city planned to fill in and develop. Houck regularly leads bird-watching hikes in the bottoms, and in 1991 he was part of a group that organized to paint a giant blue heron on one wall of the mausoleum building. That heron is now the centerpiece of a much more ambitious project.

Two years ago, the Wilhelm Funeral Home took over management of the historic Portland Memorial Mausoleum, whose original structures were built in 1901 on a bluff above the east bank of the Willamette River. Over the years, the building remained a work in progress as room after room was added to hold urns and caskets. It’s become an eight-story labyrinth which hugs the side of the steep bluff and spreads across its top, offering views out over the treetops.

There are 4.5 miles of indoor corridors in the mausoleum, Schroeder says, with valuable art scattered throughout, including a stained glass window signed by the famous glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Management is in the process of having the place listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There are about 70,000 people buried here, but the wetlands outside the windows are teeming with life.

During a tour, Schroeder steps out onto the roof of the building to display the half-finished mural. A pulsing chorus of chirps and tweets fills the air. Two Canada geese fly close overhead, honking.

Surrounded by nature, the giant, boxy building doesn’t exactly blend in.

“It looks like an old warehouse or something,” Schroeder says.

And while a flock of gigantic birds doesn’t exactly make the structure less obtrusive, they’re painted against a backdrop of sky blue and leaf green, which match the surroundings better than the building’s former dirty yellow color.

The locally based sign company, Art FX Painting & Murals, designed and is applying the mural.

“They use a paintbrush about as wide as what you’d paint a fence with,” Shroeder says. “You’d think you’d get no detail out of it, and they’re dipping these paintbrushes and just doing this by hand” — and yet the results are accurate enough to be in a textbook, if they weren’t too large by several magnitudes.

Painting the walls

Art FX employees began work on the mural late last summer, and they hope to finish this year, possibly by the Fourth of July. Progress is restricted by the weather, and by the company’s other obligations.

Art FX has been based in Portland since 1984, but most of its work is done in Los Angeles and New York. It specializes in hand-painted, wall-sized ads, making them a rarity in an industry that mostly relies on computer-printed vinyl billboards.

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