Exciting new mural on Tolman Creek Road

31 Jul Exciting new mural on Tolman Creek Road

Flow of ever-changing colors.

Learn how he did it.

Artist: Peter Paul Montague.

17 colorful photos.

Ashland neighborhood art series.

Photo essay published 2023.

“From thinking about the design to completion, it was about four months. Taking on a project like this brings me a lot of joy.” 

Peter Paul Montague

The Tolman Creek Road “canvas”

One day as he was painting the fence, I stopped by and asked Peter Paul to tell me how this art project came to be. He began by saying that friends of his recently purchased a house on Nova Drive with a long fence-line along Tolman Creek Road. They told him, “Tolman Creek is a lot louder than we thought it would be. Thank goodness there is a long fence between the house and the road.” Peter Paul laughed as he told me he was immediately excited upon hearing those words, because he has previously painted many beautiful murals. After some discussion, he presented a design idea to the couple and they gave him the go-ahead. 

Daniel (the homeowner) and Peter Paul used power sanders on the fence before painting. This removed most of the stain previously applied to the fence and smoothed out rough patches on the wood. 

Creating the design

“I wanted to do a design that was interlocking, with layers. I came up with the idea of the interlocking triangles to give depth to the art. 

He did three scale drawings of the fence to test his vision and see if it could happen. The sketches also allowed him to explore different design ideas. For example, he initially envisioned interlocking triangles along the entire fence. When he looked at that drawing, he felt a lack of flow or the sense of movement he strives to express in his artwork. He played with ideas to separate the interlocking triangles while still keeping the overall theme of the design.

I asked, “Is the waviness of the lines based on other art you have seen?” Peter Paul said, “No, it’s based on other art that I have done. I have tried to bring in more of my batik design background, so that’s where the waviness comes in. I used a lot of curvy lines in batik art.”

You might be wondering, as I did, how he created the long, consistent wavy lines. Peter Paul described making stencils out of heavy cardboard and using them to draw the initial wavy lines that were then filled in with colored wood stains.

Wavy lines and straight lines

When I first talked with Peter Paul on July 2, 2023, I thought the mural was almost complete. There was a beautiful pattern of multi-colored waves and interlocking triangles on the fence, surrounded by unpainted wood. 

I was wrong. He explained that he was leaving those open spaces on purpose, in order to fill them later with either a complementary or a contrasting design. When he told me on July 13 that he had completed the mural, I went back to take more photos. I immediately saw that he chose a contrasting design for the open spaces. 

Blending the colors: “It’s a little bit of improvisation”

Blending the colors as he moves along the fence, board by board, the experience is always new – and sometimes surprising. He enjoys staying “in the moment” watching it unfold brushstroke by brushstroke and responding to the changes.

His process is very different from knowing exactly what colors will be painted in each area of the mural. As he put it, “I don’t come out here with a paint-by-numbers, knowing exactly what’s going to go where. It’s more letting the piece talk to me and the colors speak to me as I go through it.” 

Blending the colors: how he does it

If you haven’t already done this, take a look at one row of the mural and see how the color subtly changes along the row. I found this part of the process fascinating. Though once he explained it to me it seemed simple, I would never have thought to paint in this way.

Peter Paul begins a row with one solid color. He then pulls up a small syringe with paint of another color. In the example he showed me, he began with dark green and stirred in one ml (milliliter) of the dark blue for each section of fence (usually each section was one fence board). By repeating this process with each section, the paint would very gradually become less green and more blue. If the row was long enough, it would become almost entirely blue by the end. It is fascinating that the color difference isn’t noticeable from one board to the next in a row, but if you look at the entire row you can see the color completely changing. 

Part of Peter Paul’s improvisation was varying the amount of the second color added for each section of fence. In some areas, he added two ml of the second color to make the color transition along the row a little more visible. He described also how colors change more slowly on the fence when you’re adding a light color to a dark color, and they change more quickly when you’re adding a dark color to a light color. 

About Peter Paul Montague

During a one month hiking trip in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, he learned about batik art from a friend who had trained in Kenya. Spending a summer travelling with his friend, Montague learned the basics of the East-African Batik tradition. Before Montague entered his current profession of nursing, he supported himself for many years as a craft artisan, creating batik designs on organic cotton clothing with natural indigo dye.

He adds colorful beauty to Ashland each year. Beginning in the mid-2010s, he created flowing fence murals – and then complex mosaics – on Fordyce Street. You can read about his Fordyce Street artworks and learn more about his life at this photo essay.