NO SIGNATURE,NO PLAQUE,NO INTERVIEW

It reads west to east, which is to say it reads the direction you walk if you come down from the harbour, and the first thing to say is that it is flat. Deliberately, stubbornly flat. There is no illusionistic depth anywhere in the first four panels and no attempt at one. Everything is elevation and silhouette, the way a sign painter would do it, and the whole 90 feet is keyed to the grey of the concrete underneath so that the colour looks like it soaked in rather than sat on top.

Panel one, 0 to 18 feet: the harbour at low water. Three hulls in the mud, one filled solid black, one drawn in outline, one in the hot pink that turns out to be the mural’s only saturated colour. The waterline is a single horizontal that runs the full panel and gets interrupted five times, which is how you paint a hull sitting on mud without painting any water. Above it, a pale disc that is either sun or moon and is definitely not committing.

Panel two, 18 to 36 feet: the substation. The Bellhaven switchyard, rendered as pure geometry: two lattice towers reduced to triangles, a transformer as a black rectangle, and two catenary curves between the towers, the upper one pink and the lower one black. Anyone who stood in a dark intersection in February 2022 will get there instantly. It is the most economical passage on the wall — maybe nine shapes doing the work of a photograph.

Panel three, 36 to 54 feet: eleven houses. A row of eleven identical gabled houses in flat elevation, each with a single lit window, except the seventh, whose window is black. This is the panel everyone in town has an opinion about. It is also, I am sorry to say, the panel that does not work, and I will come back to it.

Panel four, 54 to 72 feet: the annex door. A black field — the only large area of solid dark on the wall — with a steel door standing open in it, painted in the concrete’s own grey so the doorway reads as an absence rather than an object. Moving away from it, up and to the right, are twenty small pale shapes, outlined in the thinnest possible pink, so faint that in bright afternoon light you can walk past the whole panel and see only a black rectangle. Nothing is labelled. Nothing is explained. If you know what happened on this street in November 2019, you know; if you do not, it is an open door and some weather. That restraint is the single best decision on the wall.

Panel five, 72 to 90 feet: an empty intersection. Dunmore and Third, drawn with the only perspective in the piece — two receding kerb lines, a dead signal head on a pole, a long shadow laid across the road in a wash of pink at half strength. Then the mural simply stops, and the last thirty inches of the wall are left unpainted. Not primed, not feathered out. Stopped.

Brush and roller throughout, no spray, on masonry primer, with the fine work done in sign enamel — the durable, glossy, unglamorous stuff used for hand-lettering trucks. Nine colours total, which is a discipline most muralists could not hold for nine feet, let alone ninety. There was no scaffolding; there was a plank across two ladders, moved along the wall by one person, for eleven weeks, mostly between five and eight in the morning.

The economy pays off everywhere except panel three. Eleven houses, eighteen feet, and they are identical — ruled, measured, spaced on a grid, each one a mechanical repetition of the last. I understand the argument for it. Eleven houses on one street is a fact, and a fact painted eleven times becomes a rhythm. But the rhythm goes slack about six houses in, and the hand that makes the rest of the mural feel like a person’s work disappears exactly where the subject is most personal. The one black window is doing enormous heavy lifting for eighteen feet of wall.

It is the mural’s only real failure and it is a failure of nerve, not of skill. Every other passage trusts the viewer to do half the work. That one explains itself.

This is the argument that has been running in three studios and one pub since June, and it deserves its strongest version, so here it is, from the muralist Roman Feltz, who has painted six commissioned walls in this district and signed every one of them.

“An unsigned mural in a town of twenty-eight thousand where everybody already knows who painted it is not anonymity, it is a performance of anonymity, and it is a performance only one kind of person can afford to give,” Feltz said. “I sign because I need the next job. I go to the unveiling because the person who commissions the next wall is standing at the unveiling. When a man who does not need the money turns down the grant and skips the ribbon, he does not just remove himself from the process — he sets a standard of purity that the rest of us get measured against, and we will lose. And he bypassed the panel. No consultation, no approval, one guy deciding what a public wall says for the next twenty years.”

That is the case, and the last part of it is unanswerable on its own terms. He did bypass the panel. He bypassed it on purpose; he has said as much to at least two people, which is two more than he said it to me. Declining the $1,800 meant declining the review that comes attached to it.

Here is the answer, in three parts. First: the review panel in question has, in the six years I have covered it, never once approved a proposal containing a large black field, and panel four is a large black field. Second: the floodwall was on the municipal schedule for a graffiti-abatement repaint in grey this autumn, so the counterfactual to this mural is not a better, more consultative mural. It is grey.

Third and most important: the refusal is legible in the work. There is no focal point on this wall. There is no signature passage, no bravura moment, nothing composed to be photographed and cropped and used as a portfolio image. A stunt looks like a stunt. This looks like somebody stained a wall and left. You cannot fake that for ninety feet.

Sunny Okpara-Vance, who paints and teaches on the other side of the harbour, put the counter-case more briefly. “I have signed everything I ever made and I have never once been glad I did,” she said. “Roman is right that it is a luxury. He is wrong that it is a pose. Go and stand in front of panel four at seven in the morning and tell me that was made by somebody thinking about his career.”

Where Feltz is entirely right, and where this paper should say so plainly, is the structural point. The problem is not one painter declining $1,800. The problem is that $1,800 was the Port Alden Arts Council’s entire discretionary budget for public art this year, and a town that can be out-spent on its own floodwall by one person buying paint on a card has a funding problem no amount of humility will fix.

On 19 July, with three panels finished, somebody came down to the floodwall and wrote BC — 2023 in black marker in the bottom right corner of the harbour panel. Two inches high. Neat. Affectionate, obviously — whoever did it was trying to give him something.

It was gone before the next morning. He mixed grey to match, painted it out, and carried on into panel four. He did the same thing again on 28 August, three days after he finished, when the initials reappeared a little larger in the corner of panel five. Gone by Tuesday.

Consider what that costs. He could have left it. Nobody would have believed he wrote it himself, and the wall would have acquired an authorship he never had to claim. Instead he got the paint out twice, in his own time, to remove his own name from his own mural, and then declined to explain why to a newspaper that asked nicely and then asked again.

Go and look at it. Park by the pump house, walk east, and give panel four ten minutes in the early light. And if you happen to be Brandon Cowen and you are reading this: the offer stands, my number has not changed, and you are wrong about panel three.