This past Sunday night marks a milestone in my artistic career. Most of you out there who have been following the RMC blogs lately have seen, or at least figured out by now, that I like to do 'artsy' things. The last few months of my life I have tried to indulge myself in art, whether it be with little sketches, photography, writing, or music, but I had yet to dive into this genre.

 Last September, I was sitting with my cousin Ben in his plain, mostly undecorated apartment and we were talking about the things that we could do to make the apartment more 'aestheticly pleasing'. We sat in his apartment throwing out ideas, thinking about posters or tapestries that we could hang, a nice paint scheme, just something to cover up some of the plain white walls that made the apartment look so bare and what we ended up coming up with was a conglomerate of ideas.

 As we were sitting there, we came up with the idea of doing a 3-D mural on the wall. It wasn't going to be anything fancy, but just some kind of a picture that took up a small portion of the wall. After thinking about what kind of picture it would be, Ben came up with the idea of creating a door that appeared to be surreal, yet realistic. The door would go from floor to ceiling, roughly the size of a standard doorway, but would have an odd shape about it. When Ben first thought of the idea of the mishaped doorway, he described it to me as 'the doorway in Beetlejuice'. Remember the doorway at the end of the movie when the fireplace turned into a door and Beetlejuice was trying to marry Lydia? It had an odd, very eerie shape to it (aside from the fact that a little E.T. looking preacher man made of fireplace tools came out of it).

 So there we had it. We had our idea and I had the design in my head. When I started it, I sketched out what I wanted to do, but nothing was definitive until the paint was on the wall. So on the first day, I drew the door on the wall and shaped the inside of the picture. The first picture on the top shows exactly what the bedroom looked like before any paint or pencil touched the walls. It took me around 6 hours to draw the picture on the wall and paint the two green hills with a path running down the middle.

 The next few times I went over to work on the mural, I forgot to bring the camera so I do not have pictures of me doing the sky, moon, or gray stone bricks. And also, somewhere in between the time I started the mural until the time I finished it, we painted Ben's room. We two-toned it, going with maroon on one half and khaki green on the other half. This REALLY livened up the room and made it a warmer place to hang out. The mural separated the two colors on the wall, so it made for a nice transition.

  So finally, Sunday night it was finished. I added all the lines that make up the brick on the pathway, and that was it. It took nearly 50 hours to complete. Of course, it could have always been a never ending project, but unfortunately for me, Ben's lease was up and the mural has been left behind for a new tenant, or to test the trials of time against the vicious painters that come in and smear white paint on everything. Hopefully, the mural will survive for a while and another tenant can enjoy it. If not, that's what I took pictures for. Now, I'm going to be making posters of the mural and turning it into a piece of print art.

 All of the pictures that you see on the right are posted in chronological order in the order that they were taken. The top four pictures were taken as a time lapse piece, but it would be really hard to set up the transitions on here for everyone to see, so for now, everyone will just have to enjoy the pictures. Just for depth perception, there's a picture on the right of Ben lying on the ground with his arm up looking like he's crawling into the mural.

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jlaxsalinas@robertmorris.edu

This past weekend was awesome. I went with my friend Kenny and my cousin Ben to St. Louis on a little weekend road trip. The weekend was action packed and we were always on the move, which was nice because we were only there for a little over a day.

Here's how the trip started...

I woke up around 5:30am on Saturday and I was already packed and ready to go. I jumped in the shower and drove to pick up Ben, then stopped by Kenny's to pick him up. We were on the road by 6:30am heading from NW Indiana down to St. Louis. We took I-55 straight down and made a fairly short pit stop in Springfield. I had never been to Springfield, so this was all new to me. Of course I had the camera with me (no suprise to anyone) and started snapping shots of some of the historical buildings, like the Capitol Building, and the Old Capitol Building during the 'Lincoln Era'. We also saw where Abraham Lincoln use to have his law office with his law partner, and many other Abe Lincoln attractions. Unfortunately because we were pressed for time, I was not able to go to the gravesite or visit the Lincoln Presidential Library. We made a last stop at Subway before we left, then headed on the road to 'The Loo'.

The drive itself was fun because Kenny brought his video camera. Most of the people that saw us on the road probably thought we were a bunch of nuts, or just some crazy college boys having a good time, but we definately had some fun with the video camera! Mostly just trying to get people to wave to us and video taping ourselves acting stupid and going overboard with jokes.

As we got to St. Louis, I took the exit just before crossing the river and we headed to the shore. We were actually in East St. Louis, which isn't considered the most fabulous of cities. It reminded me a lot of Gary, IN. We took pictures of the St. Louis skyline and bridges and the arch and of course took out the video camera and got a lot of footage along the shore until....

...the cops showed up!!!

Now, keep in mind, we were three boys with video equipment, Indiana license plates, hanging out in a train yard, running around with our shirts off...harmless right? Well I guess not! The officer approached us and asked what we were doing. I explained to the officer (who was very nice) that I was a professional photographer and I take skyline pictures of cities. I showed him a few of the pictures from my camera and he asked to see all of our ID's. He took our drivers licenses back to his car and ran them through. Of course they came out clean and the officer explained why he had to check us. Apparently since September 11, anyone that is on that side of the river taking pictures or video tape must be looked into to see if we were terrorists or if we posed a terrorist threat. The main concern was the The Arch is a national symbol and recognized worldwide and may be a target to terrorists. The officer kindly gave us back our ID's and gave us suggestions on what to do if we came back at night to take the same pictures (which we did). He told us to just be sure that we always had our ID's on us just in case another officer stopped us later on. I was done taking pictures, so we finally headed over the river into the city.

From there, we checked into our hotel. We stayed at the Millenium Hotel Suites, which I HIGHLY recommend to anyone that goes to St. Louis. It was very reasonably priced, and it was located directly across from The Arch. It was a very classy 4-star hotel, and we all just loved it. We went up in The Arch after we checked in and even took the trip to the top. The view was amazing! Luckily for us, we had a fabulous day - 75 degrees and sunny!

We went and visited the new Busch Stadium, which was now completely finished, and just days from hosting its first home game. The field was amazing and I'll be excited to see a game there sometime!

The top of our hotel had a revolving restaurant that gives a 360 degree view of the entire city. It was very classy, so we felt out of place with our hats and t-shirts!!! We all got really good steaks and enjoyed the view and watched the sunset from the 28th floor restaurant.

We went back to the hotel room, I dumped the pictures I had taken from the camera and loaded them on to my laptop. Around 11:00, we went downstairs to the Martini Bar and had ourselves a couple drinks. There was a high school prom event also going on as well as a fraternity event, so we were people watching as we sat there. We started getting a little bored. The bartender brough over a stack of those small square bar napkins and we started having a little bit of fun. We wrote the numbers 10, 9, and 8 on the napkins, and made three sets for each of us. As people walked by, we held up one of the numbers as if it was a gymnastics competition. Everyone who walked by thought it was histarical and we quickly became the talk of the lobby. The bartender thought it was a riot, and everything was all in good fun.

We woke up the next day a little groggy from the time change (since we moved the clocks up an hour) and we got our stuff together and headed out. We took a last drive around the city before we left, then headed north. We made another pitstop in Springfield and ate Subway again, then headed home with the video camera in Kenny's hand. After I get the video transfered to digital, I'll post a video clip of some of the funny scenes. Luckily for us, we got out of Springfield and central Illinois in time to miss the tornados that came through! Apparently, they came just hours after we past through.

So back home we were. We made it home in about 4 1/2 hours! Everything went well, no one got arrested, I didn't get any tickets driving down, and all in all, it was a great time.

As usual, I have posted pictures that I took in St. Louis to the right. Some of the pictures are from Springfield also.

Thank you to all of those who have sent me feedback!

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jlaxsalinas@robertmorris.edu