For more than 30,000 years, artists have been painting murals on walls, whether in caves, Egyptian tombs or Minoan palaces. But walls crumble. Buildings get condemned. Stanchions get washed away by storm surge. Now there’s an alternative.
“A number of years ago, we were introduced to a new technology that’s called mural cloth, and it allows the artist to paint the mural in the comfort of their air-conditioned studio as opposed to out on the actual wall in the heat and the sun,” Punta Gorda Historic Mural Society President Kelly Gaylord explained. “We started switching to that technology about four or five years ago and all of our current murals are now painted on mural cloth.”
It’s more than a matter of convenience.
When the mural cloth is glued to the underlying concrete, it becomes hard as nails.
“We use a product called Mural Shield, and it’s a consolidator,” Fort Myers Mural Society Director Shari Shifrin said. “It actually bonds to the paint and the substrate behind it. So it becomes one. It almost becomes like a ceramic tile … And then we put a light wax coating across the front of it to further protect it, which repels water just like wax would.”
The Fort Myers Mural Society used this technique on the 49 murals at the basin adjoining Luminary Hotel. It worked to perfection to protect them from the mud, grime and brine deposited by hurricanes Helene and Milton’s storm surge. A quick rinse with Dawn and tap water and the murals were good as new.
But what happens if the concrete cracks and crumbles or the stanchions or building are washed away?
“We’ve actually switched to panels that are removable,” said Gaylord. “They could be removed if a hurricane’s coming, or if the building’s damaged afterwards, we could take it off and put it someplace else.”
While not every mural requires this level of protection, this is precisely the route that the Punta Gorda Mural Society is taking with its newest mural, “Developing Minds and Bodies,” by artist Keith Goodson. It will be painted on mural cloth and then installed on three long aluminum panels.
Given Southwest Florida’s proclivity for rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones and consistently low elevation in relation to the coast, an increasing number of murals could see the kind of treatments described by Gaylord and Shifrin.
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Goodson’s “Developing Minds & Bodies” captures the history of the Cooper Street Recreation Center.
Once completed, it will become the 32nd mural in the Punta Gorda collection.
The Punta Gorda Historic Mural Society will celebrate its 30th anniversary on February 13 at the Visual Arts Center. It will mark the occasion with a book launch that commemorates the society’s history and each of the murals it has installed over its three-decade existence.
For more on the Punta Gorda Mural Society, listen on WGCU.
Murals were initially painted directly on stone and block. Around 1300, artists began painting on both dry and wet plaster. The former was known as fresco; the latter as the Buon fresco technique.
Over the intervening centuries, artists have gravitated toward other materials and techniques, including tempera, oils and acrylics. Eventually, they began applying varnish and protective acrylics to protect their artworks from humidity and UV sunlight.
Mural Shield provides even more UV and weather protection for artist-grade acrylic paints, fine art aerosols, collage-based and digitally printed murals. First, two coats are applied to the substrate (which can consist of uncoated concrete, wood and signage grade panels, most exterior insulated finishing systems and stuccos, CMU block walls, brick and even painted and coated surfaces). When it dries, the completed mural cloth is glued to the substrate and coated with another layer of Mural Shield and an anti-graffiti coating.
The polymers in the Mural Shield, glue and acrylic paint layers bond with each other, forming a composite that looks and functions much like a ceramic tile. As long as the shield and anti-graffiti coats are periodically refreshed, the underlying mural should last for decades, even longer — provided the underlying substrate remains intact.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.