Projects
2018 · Central Theatre
Hot Springs, Arkansas
I arrived in Hot Springs after a major EN MASSE project in Houston, exhausted and road-worn.
Through my friend Danae, I met Chris Rix, owner of the historic Central Theatre. He was bringing the building back into use as a place for music, performance and gathering.
I asked about a budget for painting.
There wasn’t one.
He could buy the paint.
What he also offered was hospitality and the freedom to see what might happen. I began on the façade. A few days later, the long wall around the corner opened into the community collaboration that became another part of the project.
For the façade, I painted highly stylized echinacea flowers.
Their associations with healing felt at home in Hot Springs, a city whose thermal waters have long drawn people seeking relief. The flowers also offered an image for a theatre being brought into another season of life.
Luminous blues and flowing forms spread across the building. I wanted the painting to work with its architecture, allowing the flowers’ movement to extend beyond a single bounded image.
Chris gave me considerable room to follow the work.
Our exchange included paint, food, music, company and the opportunity to experiment. I brought my time and experience into a place where those contributions were welcomed.
On one side of the building, I was working through the demands of a large composition. Around the corner, neighbours were arriving to help paint a shared wall.
Moving between the two brought together different pleasures of my practice: sustained attention to my own painting, and the unpredictable life of making something with others.
I finished the mural only seconds before a major storm moved through Hot Springs.
The last passage was the series of radiating bands above the historic marquee. I painted them freehand, working through a dense arrangement of cables, supports and structural elements as the wind gathered.
Those clean, flowing lines hold a very physical memory for me. Painting them was some of the most technically demanding work of my life, though little of that difficulty is visible in the result.
Elbow grease disappears in the finished photograph. I see the composition, but I also remember reaching through the obstructions, following each band in high winds beneath an odd purple and dusty magenta sky that meant no good.
The mural was later painted over following a change in ownership and an exterior renovation.
The strength of the community’s response moved me. For people who had lived with the painting, its disappearance meant a change to a familiar place.
I was sorry to lose it, too.
For a brief moment, the old theatre bloomed.
© Jason Botkin