BY ANDREW BAILEY
BG Independent News Correspondent
A landscape of juniper trees at Juniper Brewing is one of the dozens of murals Gordon Ricketts and his students have painted.
Ricketts, teaching professor at BGSU’s School of Art, leads a mural painting course over the summer, where students work with local businesses and community organizations to cover indoor and outdoor walls in eye-catching artwork.
Ricketts and the students, and the business owners that commission them, collaborate to design pieces that “speak to the area,” or relate to the location they are painted in.
The Juniper mural is one owners Zach and Chris Tracy have been anticipating since they opened the restaurant early this year. Chris was notified of the opportunity through a friend and was quickly in touch with Ricketts to begin designs.
While their work is mostly in East Toledo, the class also has murals in Bowling Green. There is apiece featuring chickens and hops — a beer ingredient — at Arlyn’s Good Beer and a circle of colored dots next to a donkey in the parking lot behind QDOBA.
As of earlier this week, there is a mural of juniper trees growing out of a rocky, southwestern landscape in the back section of Juniper.
The Juniper mural has been a one-month project for Ricketts and his team, alongside a geometric design with the words “Toledo Love” outside of Carpets Beautiful in Toledo, and a work emulating children’s art outside of Toledo Day Nursery.
All of the students — 11 undergraduates and one graduate — get a chance to work on each of the murals, with an experienced member leading each individual mural. Virginia Vasey, an art teacher at Perrysburg Junior High School, led the Juniper mural, working with the Tracys to finalize the design.
Ricketts said an indoor mural like Juniper’s differs from outdoor murals in how people are meant to look at them.
Outdoor murals are typically larger and meant to be looked at while driving by. This means less work on smaller details and more work on “the bigger picture,” so the whole piece can be seen from across the street.
Indoor murals are all about the fine details.
“People will be getting up close to (Juniper’s mural), so we’re able to do more with the designs of the tree trunks, make it more intricate. People can walk around this whole section and take in every inch,” Ricketts said.
The attention to detail is shown through the wispy features of the trunks, and a family of two parents and three children hidden in the art to represent the Tracy family. Zach said he hopes customers will try to find each member of the family.
The idea for the piece came from the Tracys for their business’ namesake: the juniper tree.
The tree’s roots and trunk are “gnarled and grow out in all sorts of directions,” Zach said. The non-linear path of the tree’s growth symbolizes the couple’s journey to opening Juniper, one of the many careers the couple has pursued.
Junipers grow in a harsh environment, and oftentimes the majority of the tree is the roots contained in the rocks it grows out of. The tree’s survivability and the typically unseen root system are exemplary of the couple’s tenacity, and their shared value of hard work.
The borders around the trees come from another interest of the Tracys: The Allman Brothers Band. Vasey evoked the looping designs from the band’s concert posters to give the trees “more of a pop,” she said.
Vasey hopes people can look at each of the murals and see the beauty in them.
“We’ve worked really hard on them and Gordon and all of us are so proud of the work.”
Community appreciation of murals has come a long way since Ricketts first started the class. Art spanning hundreds of square feet of downtown walls is often looked down upon as graffiti, he said.
“The aesthetic is becoming more recognized though. It adds to communities and brings an extra layer of color that bare walls just don’t have,” he said. Using the Juniper mural as an example, Ricketts said, “Zach and Chris wanted something of their own on these walls, something to represent them and their business. They didn’t want to just hang pictures.”
While there’s only a few murals in Bowling Green, Ricketts said interest is growing. He said city council members Jeff Dennis and Rachel Phipps have contacted him with ideas, and he hopes word will spread.
“Murals out on the street, too, they can give even more identity to a community. Art is expressive. They aren’t necessarily there to ‘improve things, per se,’ but they’re there as a manner of expression from the community.”
