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ON CHAOS, FEAR, SURVIVAL & LUCK: LONGEVITY IS THE ANSWER
by Doug Menuez, ASMP NY

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Outtakes & Retakes

Wallpaper Murals?

Have You Ever Thought About Wallpaper Murals?

By Jack McConnell

For the past 35 years, after seeing most of my photos used 8.5x11 inches or less in brochures and ads, it has been fun to see them sized up to nine feet high and 20 feet wide! We just installed three floor-to-ceiling photo murals in the Hartford Public Library as part of their Capital Improvement Renovation. The South Wall in the lobby is 80 feet long and consists of 10 color scenes of Hartford; the North Wall is 60 feet long and contains 7 color photos of Hartford, and the Wallace Stevens Conference Room on the third floor consists of four black and white photos of locations having to do with the poet’s life.

All the original images were shot on film. Three are blown up from 35mm slides, and the remainder were shot on a variety of medium format cameras. The clarity and color brilliance are amazing, even sitting in chairs two or three feet away. As you walk down the book aisles toward the mural, you feel that you could walk right into the scenes and pluck flowers off the bushes.

While my work has been used for similar “wallpaper mural” installations at the MGM Grande hotel at Foxwoods and at PriceWaterhouse Coopers regional headquarters in Hartford, this is the first time I’ve been responsible for the production and installation. And believe me, I’ve been biting my nails.

I shot some new images, and Paula went through our stock file of Hartford and whittled down 300 tentative choices to the final 21. Sandy Birner, our tech wonder, scanned them and outputted three-inch scale samples which the Library approved in one short ten-minute meeting. I was stunned. This was too easy.

My next smart move was to call a friend who commissions trade show productions, and he referred me to one of his vendors who does this kind of large scale print work all the time. Carl Ward owns CW Graphic Imaging in Fairfield and he showed us the work of a “wallpaper printer” in Philadelphia, who does murals and display banners for Disney and Las Vegas casinos. So we figured we were in good hands.

After scanning our film, they reworked the color four times under Carl’s guidance, until we were satisfied. A commercial paint and wallpaper installer from Forestville sent over a couple of ace wallpaper hangers, and they managed to hang all the sheets of 54 inch wide paper without a hitch. Two weeks later when the wallpaper had “cured,” they came back to apply three coats of protective coating.

Anyone wanting more specific information can call me. But my best advice, as always, is to surround yourself with good people.

Speaking of large-scale projects, another recent art installation was a 9’x12’ mosaic for the Gershon Fox banquet room at 960 Main Street. The interior designer chose one of my nighttime skylines of Hartford because of the strong use of magentas, gold, mauve, and black which fit the Art Deco feeling of the room. Jim Duval from J&M Image Works in Hartford, printed the scene into twelve 3x3 foot sections, and Joe Petrini of Petrini Frame, framed the prints without mats in a thin black frame. Each picture abuts the next with about an inch of white wallspace showing, which gives the installation a mosaic feeling. The photos were sprayed with a protective coating so they could be hung without glass to eliminate reflections and glare.

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