Destruction/Construction Part 3

My nieces and I painted this Hokusai-inspired mural (you only see the right half of it here, it’s huge!) on a big empty wall at home a few years ago. That we painted it together was the hardest part of letting it go. But I’m telling myself I’ll never leave a wall white and blank for long, so there’ll be something new soon.

Strange that the mural never really ended up in a sketch until all the construction started and it was almost time for it to come down.Here it forms the backdrop to the men working on raising the floor. Sketched in pastels on a dusty brown paper which seemed a perfect reflection of the layer of dust that seems to cover everything at home these days.

Here is the ceiling getting it’s first coat of primer, before the mural wall does…

And then coat#1 of primer goes over the mural, fading it back to a ghost of a wave. It’ll be a few more coats before it’s all gone, but goodbye, Great Wave!