Walk on my art, please

At the beginning of 2006, my wife, Lynne, asked me to design and paint a map for her. Ordinarily this would not be a problem but Lynne thinks big, I mean, really big. At this time in our lives she had just finished raising $6 million dollars to build a new children’s museum and the interior was getting close to being finished. So she began to think of things to put inside of this new building. She had several older exhibits that could just be moved in but she wanted something new, (well, several dozen new things, but we will stick to this one for now). Since the museum is located in Ogden, Utah, she wanted a map of Utah. A very large map of Utah, one you could walk all over and find special things in our wonderful state. It also had to be compatible to what is taught in the 4th grade about state history. After several months of research and drawing we finally came up with a list of 160 items; flora and fauna, historical places, people, things and of course, national parks and monuments. I drew all of this on computer, at the finished size, with text and all included. It was printed out on vinyl and burnished down on a large set of connected white boards. Now all we had to do was fill in the blanks, almost 400 square feet of blanks. We painted the flat color areas of the counties first, then the detail work of all the map’s items. Paint kept getting splashed around so there was a team of ‘tapers’ for the edges and another team of ‘scrapers’ to scrape the paint off the black vinyl lines, (the edge of credit cards was found to be best for that). Finally the detail painters were enlisted to finish all of the finer art work. I spent two weeks of my summer vacation in July, painting the map with a very talented group of artists. In total, it took six weeks to complete the project. You can see in the photo on the left that there are pillows, cushions, books, print-outs and other reference works. We tried to keep food off the map, but that wasn’t always successful. When finished the map was coated with several layers of polyurethane and then covered with more layers of floor wax, it has been very adequate to keep the map from getting damaged by thousand of people walking on it. This is without a doubt the largest piece of art that I have ever had a hand in doing and one of which I am very proud of.