New mural adds lots of color to Barclay Park

Nate Mulkey and LaRene Farmer install a mural painted by Jerry Werner of Sisters. Werner's painting was reproduced on vinyl panels and installed on a wall at Barclay Park. photo by Jim Cornelius During the heyday of public mural art in the 1930s, famed artists like Diego Rivera could be found on scaffolds fronting municipal buildings, painstakingly brushing in the details of their monumental works.

The great mural artists could never have conceived of the technology that allowed Sisters artist Jerry Werner to create a mural in his own studio -- then reproduce it on a stretch of wall space at Harold and Dorothy Barclay Memorial Park in downtown Sisters.

Werner painted his mural, which depicts the signature events and activities of Sisters, on an eight-foot-long canvas. Then he had the mural photographed digitally and the digital image reproduced in a much larger format on vinyl panels.

LaRene Farmer and Nate Mulkey of Custom Graphic Services, a Portland-area firm, installed the vinyl panels on the exterior wall of the Barclay Park restroom facility on Monday, May 24.

Werner himself was on hand to watch the installation and he was astounded by the process -- and by how perfectly the painting is reproduced.

"I purposely did it with a lot of texture so that it looks painted on," Werner said.

And it does. It is virtually impossible to tell that the painting is, in fact, a digital image on vinyl.

"It's a special, outdoor, UV-coated vinyl that holds up through weather and pretty much anything," Werner said.

The artist, who was commissioned to paint the mural by the City of Sisters, contacted an artist in Florida who reported that a painting exposed to the harsh Florida sun for 10 years has not faded.

The painting uses the motif of quilts to symbolize major events -- the Quilt Show, obviously, the Rodeo, Sisters' music festivals and car shows. In the background, figures can be seen engaging in the range of Sisters' classic activities --golf, fishing, hunting, cycling.

"All the stars are music notes for (the) Starry Nights (Concert Series)," Werner said.

The artist used mixed media -- wash, oil and acrylic to create his representative work for Sisters.

As public art, it is a symbolic representation of the community and it adds color to the downtown park. It is also exposed.

According to Werner, one of the advantages of the vinyl technology is that the mural is easily maintained and kept clean and it can be replaced panel by panel if one is ever damaged.