A mural — both stark and vivid — depicting Smithers’ past and glimpsing into its future, was unveiled in the Smithers City Hall/Gateway Center earlier this month.
According to Beach Vickers, the city grant writer and director of parks, arts and recreation under the title of SPARKS, Kanawha County resident Blake Wheeler, a local professional mural painter, was named an art fellow by the Tamarack Foundation.
The foundation provided Smithers with a pandemic relief grant that enabled Wheeler to create an original 8-foot by 4-foot mural evoking the city’s diverse history and future vision as a portal for local residents and tourists to outdoor recreation in Fayette County.
Vickers said a total Tamarack Foundation grant of $7,500 underwrote Clarksburg’s Rustic Mechanicals performance of “Romeo and Juliet” in the Gateway Center earlier this summer, plus a Shakespeare acting class which was taught to Smithers Senior Center attendees, as well as Wheeler’s mural.
Also under the same grant, West Virginia painter Nichole West will install her outdoor mural on the facade of the Wellness Place, a city center for exercise classes, public meetings and other events later this summer or fall, said Vickers.
Wheeler, of Marmet, was on hand to help hang the mural in the front entrance to city hall on Sept. 1. An official unveiling with the Tamarack Foundation occurred on Sept. 6 ahead of the city’s HubCAP meeting. (HubCAP, a program of the WV Community Development Hub, is training and inspiring local volunteers to organize community improvement projects and providing Smithers, as well as, separately, Montgomery and Oak Hill, with seed money for projects, including a local market analysis survey.)
Wheeler visited Smithers a few months back for research purposes, then he launched the project in early July and finished in late August. The mural was completed using latex paint on a 4×8 aluminum sheet, he said.
Maneuvering around a full-time day job, he says, “I work on (art) evenings and weekends and whenever I can.”
He estimated he spent 60 or 70 hours on the work commissioned for Smithers.
He named the mural “Gateway” and said he looks at it as “sort of a welcoming to the city center.”
“I think my favorite part is just the idea of getting to do this sort of black and white frame of images, to have this bright orange kind of middle point (and a sunset) that represents the gateway, like a literal gateway for the present or the future,” Wheeler stressed.
His favorite part of actually painting the work was “probably the miners and getting to paint their portraits. I like to paint people more so than anything else.”
Wheeler said he participates sometimes in group shows. Over the past five years, he said, “I’ve been involved in public art projects, and those take a huge amount of time. I find those a lot more rewarding.”
Wheeler has works displayed in, among other cities, Charleston, Summersville, Hurricane and Bluefield.
“I’m happy to have been chosen for it and be given the opportunity to do it,” said Wheeler, who had assistance from his father-in-law, Jack King, along with folks on the Smithers end, in hanging the mural.
“Along with tourism and building up jobs and beautification of the city, we’re also trying to grow the arts,” said Smithers Mayor Dr. D. Anne Cavalier. “We have our Plein Arts Festival event, we have our Shakespeare events, and we have our murals.
“We’re just very, very pleased that funding agencies agree with us and help us fund artists like today.”
“I’m excited that he was able to capture so many points of history in one picture; it really is amazing,” Cavalier said of Wheeler’s mural. Among the highlights is Wheeler crafting the city’s year of incorporation, 1938, into the work, as well as artwork depicting Smithers native Gino Marchetti, who went on to years of National Football League success, and art memorializing the area’s coal mining heritage.
The mural also has other features including the New River Gorge Bridge, as well as a greyhound depicting the mascot of the local school, Valley PK-8. “The Burger Carte, he’s got the Burger Carte in there,” Cavalier said.
The public is invited to view the mural from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. weekdays at the #2 Greyhound Lane, Smithers.
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