♪ Blue> Hey, get in.

I want to take you to show you something.

♪ I want to take you, to show you a mural I painted about four years ago here in Columbia, South Carolina.

♪ My name is Blue Sky.

I'm an artist... a muralist, really.

♪ I started painting murals in 1974, and this mural I'm taking you to see was the first one I painted.

I'd been content to paint easel paintings for years, but, well, I don't know... art has taken some strange turns lately.

I think art should really be for the people.

It should be out on the street for the people.

Like, here's Main Street right here.

Here's... in Columbia... like, there's no art on Main Street.

So, I decided I'd bring some art out for the people, put it out on a building downtown.

Art originally, was in churches and public places, and I think, art has gotten to be too private lately.

You know, private galleries, only the wealthy can afford it, and so I decided that I would do a big painting on a building downtown.

♪ The building is 50 feet by 75 feet.

It's across the street from a hospital, so people in the hospital have something to look at while they're there.

There's always a rapid turnover of people in the hospital, so there's always a nice audience of people who can look out and see this mural, which is adjacent to a parking lot, on the Federal Land Bank Building in Columbia.

♪ It took a year to paint it, and it's an illusion.

♪ It's an illusion... because I'm interested in illusion, I'm interested in reality.

♪ Reality is... it's tougher to paint than abstraction, because with abstraction it's more of a... personal thing, you know.

It's like a personal language where...

I don't know, maybe or maybe not.

A person might understand an abstract painting.

But with my painting, I want everybody to understand it.

I think it's been well received.

A lot of people like it.

Now if you look up here, we're on Marion Street.

If you look up here, on your left, you'll see my mural.

What you're looking at is, well, I hope it's self-descriptive, but what you're looking at is a tunnel... going through this building to the sunrise on the other side.

♪ And, there's a highway going through this tunnel.

And we're going to drive through that highway or seem to drive through this highway.

And here we go.

♪ This is "Tunnelvision."

(vehicular sounds) Took me a year to paint it.

Started in the winter of 1974.

Finished it in the fall of 1975.

We announced that we were going to do this project with a news conference before I started.

(sighing) I wish we hadn't done that because... it's bad policy to tell somebody you're going to do something because then, if you don't do it, it looks bad.

And there was a time when I was painting the mural when it looked... bad.

(vehicular sounds) So I was very discouraged, and I started over again on the left corner here.

I want to show you this corner.

(birds chirping) I was listening to Beethoven.

♪ While I was listening to Beethoven, I realized that to do a large work of art, you have to break it down into movements.

(Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony") This is the first movement, here.

♪ And it ascends up... to the top.

(music intensifies) This portion was inspired by Beethoven.

♪ It was like the first movement of the "Fifth Symphony"... powerful and jagged and rough... ♪ strong statement.

♪ This... this portion here was inspired.

♪ Then came the problem of the windows.

I didn't know what to do with the windows.

The windows are there.

I didn't know whether to camouflage them or try to incorporate them into the mural.

So I incorporated them into the mural.

And the shadow of the rock that juts out up there crosses over the mullions on the windows.

You can see the shadow.

So the windows actually help the illusion.

(motor humming) See this wet cement?

(motor humming) It's just an illusion.

(boot striking metal) That's real.

Cost me 254 dollars, I bought them from the South Carolina Highway Department.

Someone asked me, "What are the guardrails for?"

I said, "That's to keep cars from running into the sides of the tunnel."

(siren blaring) Behind these guardrails... are real rocks.

I handpicked these rocks at the rock quarry and painted them, to look like they fell off up there and fell down.

(rock crashing) Illusion...

I love it.

Over here... (birds twittering) The South Carolina Highway Patrol, South Carolina highway caution sign... actual size, actual color.

(birds twittering) Stripes, like are used on bridges in South Carolina.

(birds twittering) Now, leading into this jagged... blasted out... rough... hole... is an area of blackness.

Just solid black.

There's a ring of blackness.

♪ This blackness is a counterpoint for the brilliant sunrise on the other side.

♪ ♪ ♪ The other side was inspired by Bach... (machinery sounds) Bach's "Concerto No.

57."

♪ As we look over to the other side, the colors are all much softer... prettier... in contrast with the dark earth colors on this side of the tunnel.

♪ Behind the rising sun, we see a star, which is the most distant point in the mural.

♪ ♪ It looks better as it grows older.

The rocks look more mature.

♪ Okay, I'm taking you to the subject of my second mural.

(car engines roaring) My second drive-in mural.

This mural, just as "Tunnelvision"... was meant to be seen from the car's point of view.

It was commissioned.

(truck engine roaring) They asked me to paint a historical subject, and so I researched around Florence County.

That's where we are, in Florence County, outside of Florence, South Carolina.

(traffic buzzing) I discovered that the most beautiful historic subject in Florence was the Great Pee Dee River.

Now, I'm gonna show you the river and how it looks in the daytime, but I painted it at night.

Okay, the river's coming up on our left, right now.

This is the scene that I painted.

(Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata") ♪ This scene from the Great Pee Dee River was painted and inspired also by a piece by Beethoven, his "Moonlight Sonata."

I listened to the music the whole time I was working on the painting, to try to capture the... stillness and the pace of the river at night.

♪ ♪ This painting, which was done with real Pee Dee River water, took eight months to complete.

♪ Although, this is a night scene, it was painted, it's a painting of darkness.

It would be impossible to film it or photograph it the way it really looks.

It's much darker than you see it here.

So you can not see the stars that are in the sky.

♪ The stars are... astronomically correct, and they twinkle.

All the constellations in the northern hemisphere in the month of June are included.

♪ The scene takes place early in the morning, when the river has a mist covering it.

This is just before the sun rises, and the last few stars are out, and the moon is in a crescent.

♪ This guardrail... is the viewpoint that you would have if you saw the actual Pee Dee River.

You see it through a guardrail like this.

You're looking across a bar.

On the real river, you can walk up on the sidewalk and stand like this, looking over... at the scene.

♪ So psychologically, the bridge rail sets the setting for the painting.

♪ ♪ ♪ About a year after I finished "Tunnelvision"... a picture of "Tunnelvision" appeared in the "National Enquirer" newspaper.

And the people here in Flint, Michigan, were looking for someone to paint a mural in downtown Flint.

Because Flint is undergoing a renovation in their downtown section similar to Columbia, or similar to Columbia, should do.

And, they wanted me to come up here and paint a tunnel in Flint.

Well, I told them I didn't want to paint another tunnel.

I thought a automotive painting might be more appropriate for Flint since they manufacture Buicks here in Flint and Chevrolet trucks.

It's a automotive city.

They went along with the idea, and after about a year of negotiating... we approved- we got an approved sketch, and we proceeded to paint the mural.

Jan Sigmon and I came up here, and she helped me.

She's my assistant.

And, we worked on it together.

She helped to laying the background.

And... this mural, just as "Tunnelvision" is... is adjacent to a parking lot.

In this mural, the parking lot is incorporated into the design in a way that the mural is an extension of the parking lot.

I have a regular parking lot, a real parking lot and then my painting is an overflow parking lot.

Where the overflow traffic can park up on the wall, here at "The Flint Journal."

Okay, here we go into the parking lot.

We're gonna try to drive up the wall.

We're following the arrows through the parking lot.

(techno-pop music) Ah, there's a drain.

Okay, we're going up toward the gate.

Going on the gate and going through the gate.

Okay, here we go up onto the wall now.

♪ Going up the wall... to try to find a parking space.

We're passing past another drain on the wall, just like the one in the real parking lot.

Going up toward the top.

♪ Well this, parking lot just leads right out into outer space at the top, so we'd better go over to the right.

And here we see the name of the building that it's painted on.

It's painted on "The Flint Journal" newspaper building in Flint, Michigan.

Now, over on the right side of the mural, we see the... large, simulated interstate highway sign, which bears the title of the piece, which is "Overflow Parking."

♪ Now, here we have... handicapped parking space.

Next to this handicapped parking space, you can see the oil drippings where cars parked there and left its oil drippings.

Down here we have a real guardrail, which is orange, to correlate with the orange barriers on the wall.

All of these orange barriers, all of these stripes and everything, were taken from a traffic study made in Boston.

I read the study, and I followed their traffic plans for marking parking spaces and traffic flow through cities.

Here we can see where, a truck and cars have driven across this and left their tire marks, just before they start up the wall.

You know, the tires skid when they come onto the wall here.

They've driven across the arrow and left their tire tracks.

Here's, somebody's driven across this little curb here, which is painted orange to keep you from driving into the hole there, but somebody's driven across that, too.

Over here, we have a "no parking" space, designated by the diagonal stripes.

(truck engine rumbling) Up here, someone has tossed a Styrofoam cup, and it seems to defy gravity as it hangs on the wall here, casting a shadow.

The first car I put on the mural, the first car I painted was the, car you see in the upper left-hand corner.

This is a Pontiac LeMans.

The driver of the car is not wearing a shirt and you can see his muscular arm laying on the window sill.

He's wearing a red baseball cap and smoking a cigarette.

He's sitting there, looking in his rearview mirror, as if he's anticipating maybe backing out.

I think the muscle car goes very well with the muscle arm.

Beneath this car is a long, cool... Lincoln Continental.

The type you might see a real estate agent drive.

If you look very closely in the rear window, you can see a tennis racquet and what appears to be the top of a teddy bear's head.

Notice the rear overhang of the Lincoln Continental, how it hangs over the curb.

Seems to... almost like he's almost backed over the edge.

While you're looking, you might notice the stains, the brown stains from the rust where the radiators of these cars have boiled over and left brown stains on the curb.

You can see expansion joints in the curb and the cracks in the pavement.

All this is done to enhance the realism, because this curb is the same as the curb in the real parking lot.

Now, beneath this Lincoln Continental is a, swinging single special, a Cutlass Supreme.

A new Cutlass Supreme, all shiny and new with the reflections on it... the vinyl top.

The orange stripe you see on the driver's window is a reflection of the line on the ground.

The last car I painted on the mural was a result of a... the celebration they were having in Flint when I painted this mural.

They were having Buick's 75th anniversary.

And so, for the old-timers, I painted this 1953 Buick Roadmaster.

I used a Buick, as a model that belonged to someone who worked here at the "Journal."

They posed their car for me while I painted it.

And if you look very closely at this Buick, you'll see the taillights are glowing as if he'd just pulled into the parking lot and still has his brakes on.

And if you look very closely , you can see his right turn signal is still blinking.

I hope we can...

I hope we can appreciate my artistic...solution to the parking problem here in Flint.

I hope now that you've seen my three murals that you have a better understanding of the problems that a muralist would encounter in undertaking a project like this.

It's not like painting in my studio where I have the privacy and warmth.

I'm protected from the elements.

When I paint a mural, I'm out in the elements.

I am painting on someone else's wall, and there's always the possibility of censorship.

(sighing) My work is exposed to... numerous critics each day... which can be very discouraging.

And it's important that I try to keep my spirits high when I'm working because, if my spirits aren't high, the work can't be good.

Because of this, it makes it a... very tough undertaking.

But, I enjoy doing murals.

(sighing) Would you like a ride?

(techno-pop music) ♪ ♪ ♪ I try to paint the... ordinary things you see today like, uh... parking lots... highways, cars... ♪ trucks.

♪ These are the things in our landscape in the 20th century.

♪ (muffler rumbling) These are the relics of our civilization.

♪ And I'm glad to be here to paint them, because I think that when a person sees just ordinary things painted up on a wall, like and sees ordinary things transformed into art... ♪ it's bound to change his attitude toward... just ordinary objects, make him respect ordinary things a little more, and appreciate their beauty a little more.

♪ If I can do that, I think I'll have accomplished something.

♪ And I hope that when people see my work, they... ♪ they'll feel a slight uplifting in spirit.

♪ Well...

I've got to turn left here, so I could let you out here on this corner.

I've got to go on.

It's really been nice talking to you, and I hope to see you again.

♪ ♪ (car door shutting) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪