La Jolla’s Newly Colored Walls

For all the art hanging on walls inside La Jolla’s homes and institutions, the neighborhood’s outer walls don’t exactly paint the same picture.

“You look around La Jolla and it’s mainly beige and light green,” said Mark Quint, owner of Quint Contemporary Art, a gallery in La Jolla. “You would think with the Spanish heritage that there’d be more bright colors in La Jolla. But there aren’t very many murals and there aren’t very many colors — I think.”

This year a group of La Jollans, including local arts scene powerhouses like Quint, got together to put up some art in their neighborhood with the La Jolla Community Foundation. They decided on temporary murals because they could work with established, internationally known artists without dealing with permits or the expense of installing a sculpture.

Local artist and former University of California, San Diego professor Kim MacConnel (whose home we visited to peek at the art on his walls) painted the community’s first mural in August in an alley behind Girard Avenue.

On Saturday, Seattle-based artist Roy McMakin (who did his master’s at UCSD) will create the community’s second mural on Eads Avenue. I visited the MacConnel mural and the blank wall where McMakin’s will be for our segment this week on NBC 7/39. (Tune in at 4:30 p.m. today to see more.)

Saturday’s mural will be an interactive project. McMakin hopes close to 1,000 people come by the wall to tell him their favorite color — and that will dictate what comes next in the mural. KPBS spoke with McMakin on These Days yesterday morning about the project.

I’ve been asking a few different people this week what they think will be the favorite of the favorite colors. I got one vote for orange, two for green, one for blue.

Quint, the gallery owner, guessed red. “But I don’t have anything to back that up,” he said. “I think that’s what makes this mural interesting is that we don’t know what it will look like. Might have 20 reds next to each other. Might be purple, for all I know.

Quint imagined that some people who view the finished mural will drive themselves crazy trying to figure out why the artist put which color where. That’s not the point, he said.

“I think what’s interesting is kind of just how basic it is. It’s a very, very simple, elementary, first-grade question. ‘What’s your favorite color?’ But everybody asks it,” he said. “And at some point everybody thinks about it. So I wouldn’t put too much — I wouldn’t read too much into this. I think it’s going to be much more visually exciting than mentally exciting.”

Here’s another photo from Sam Hodgson of the MacConnel mural:

And a timelapse of the MacConnel mural, shot by local photographer Rebecca Joelson:

Kim MacConnel – Timelapse from Rebecca Joelson on Vimeo.

I’m the arts editor for VOSD. You can leave a comment below or send me a note at kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org, or call me at 619.325.0531. You can also follow me on Twitter: @kellyrbennett.