July 28-August 3, 2005

art

the wright way: Don Gensler, who uses video, questionnaires and other tools to humanize his paintings, works on a mural at the Richard R. Wright School at 27th and Dauphin in North Philadelphia. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Up Close and Personal

Though his works are large-scale, Don Gensler's paintings remain intimate.

by Robin Rice

Painted on a high horizontal wall in the Sachs Rehearsal Room, a dancer travels purposefully though space, assuming and abandoning a sequence of shadowy gestures of the past. Now, suspended in a moment of weightless freedom, she glows incandescently with energy, before moving forward into the future. It captures an instant of pure kinetic joy.

Muralist Don Gensler put the finishing touches on the 30-foot-long painting last week in the University of Pennsylvania's Irvine Auditorium. Visible to all who enter the rehearsal room, the mural, which will be officially dedicated this fall, is a privately commissioned memorial to a UPenn undergraduate named Emily Sachs who died in 1995. Her family dedicated the dance studio to her and dreamed of adding a mural but not a literal portrait. After seeing video of Emily dancing, Gensler suggested that it could become the basis of a painting about dance and movement. The result will resonate for the dancers who share this room.

Gensler, who typically uses video and many other tools in planning his work, is unquestionably one of the more innovative muralists working today. It is just his ability to see beyond the obvious, his willingness to go the extra mile, that makes his work stand out. One of his primary projects this summer is a series of murals painted around the entire exterior of the Richard R. Wright School in North Philly. It's a revitalization project involving the Mural Arts Program, the school district and the Eagles Youth Partnership.

Every year the Eagles help to sponsor a mural and they build a playground, plant trees and improve the chosen area in other ways. One day last month, over 400 volunteers worked at the Richard Wright site. "The key to the complicated agenda for [community painting days] is to make sure everything is prepped. Everybody feels better if they're working," he explains. He made designs for the lower sections of walls so they could safely be painted without using scaffolding.

Gensler's Symbols of Change (2004), at 21st and Market, was part of a citywide anti-truancy project.

Now, with an assistant, he is completing the ambitious murals, which are loosely united around the theme "Do the Wright Thing." The design began with a series of questionnaires that were distributed in the community and the school. What is your voice? What is important to you? My community is .... ? Teachers, kids, parents: Some 200 people replied with personal responses varying from a few sentences to poems to essays to little pictures. Gensler says he "read it all as a way into the project. From that I pulled words out: communicate, grow, family, faith, succeed. They were words that echoed with the community. I found it interesting to interweave these words with the faces of the kids." These portraits of students will dominate the finished murals.

The most distinctive quality of Gensler's approach is not so much in the preparatory phases, although he is exceptionally thorough in communicating with the people muralists call stakeholders: neighborhood residents, school or other groups relevant to the mural, community leaders and funding sources. He consistently documents locations and communities in video and still photographs and uses them as a visual resource. It's in the context of computer-based manipulation of these raw visual materials that the originality of Gensler's vision shines. The illusionism made possible through the manipulation of digital media is impressive, almost magical. Sometimes muralists are so bewitched that they allow these tools to determine the finished product.

Gensler, in contrast, likes to work through these filtering mechanisms but he restructures and assembles the products into new wholes. Perhaps because he began as an abstract painter, Gensler seems to appreciate different ways of fragmenting and constructing illusions as much as simply fooling the eye. His murals emphasize painterly techniques such as fuzzed-out, brushed edges and layered patterns.

Gensler, who painted the third largest mural in the world across the street from the Eagles' stadium (Moving Toward Your Dreams, 900 feet, 2003), always emphasizes people in his murals. In the Lincoln Financial Field mural, a repeated running figure of a child at play is a modular unit, shown in silhouette and in naturalistic detail. One of his favorite approaches is to represent faces in different scales of pixilation. Some appear simplified into large squares; others are composed of smaller or almost invisible squares.

Words and lettering can add another level of abstraction. His mural about truancy, Symbols of Change (21st and Market, 2004), depicts heroic-scale portrait heads of children in different levels of pixilation. Gensler covered most of the surface of this mural with an open, almost translucent pattern composed of symbols created by young people in anti-truancy programs. The pattern flows in and out of visibility like an atmosphere or curtain.

Gensler's a perfectionist. "You have to fall in love with the mural process," he says. "It takes time. I get bossy when I get up there on the scaffolding." For centuries muralists have used grids to enlarge drawings. Like many, Gensler often works on a scale of one foot (of wall) to one inch (in the drawing). In addition to the grid superimposed on his original drawing, the system of using computer-originated grids to build digital images constantly reminds him of the relationship of vertical and horizontal. "I've started to recognize that the grid is really important for me," he says, acknowledging its power as an abstract element.

Something about Gensler's attention to light and dark, the silhouetting of one against the other and the subtle blending of one into the other, so often makes the viewer of Gensler's murals conscious of the marvelous gift of sight, of visual experience as pure sensation. This heightened awareness of an internal experience, of looking and seeing, imperceptibly becomes a metaphor for all kinds of insight, psychological as well as physical, into the people in Gensler's murals.