Pink Floyd's The Wall Mural

What kind of kid paints semi-disturbing cartoon characters directly on their bedroom wall? What kinds of parents allow this to happen? The answers are left up to you, but the fact is that what you see above is what one wall of my room looked like when I was in High School. It is a scaled up reproduction of the inside album jacket artwork found on Pink Floyd's "The Wall" album. On the right you can see the orginal inside jacket (was a double album and it folded out). Remember, this was still the world of vinyl records.

The final result had all the elements form the right-hand side of the jacket artwork, but I also planned on doing the left-hand side of the jacket which is "The Judge", depicted as a big rear-end. Though having a big rear-end painted on my wall was a big disconcerting, the main reason I abandoned this was my fear of not being able to adequately recreate the flesh tones properly at the scale I would need. The location of The Judge would have been where the Yellow Submarine Mural eventually wound up going. I has also planned to build up a layer of spackle on top of the sheetrock to be able to carve out the edges of the bricks to give it more of areal 3D brick feel, but that wound up being a bit too ambitious.

I happened to have been lucky enough to have been at one of the original Pink Floyd "The Wall" concerts. They only did a handful of shows in Los Angeles and a handful at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, NY where I lived at the time (I was there on the last evening of the shows). That also happened to be the first concert I ever went to, so maybe it retrospectively makes sense why I was so keen on creating such a mural. From start to finish was probably about a year elapsed time. I wound up doing a bunch of other murals (see here, here and here), though I cannot recall if they all were done after this was complete, or I was interleaving some of them.

I have this stack of pictures and drawings that I've been carrying along with me all these years, and they contained some surprising remnants of the past projects: such as the orginal concept design for the mural and some practice templates and sketches.

Here's an interesting, albeit disturbing, thought I just now remembered as I was typing these notes. When my daughter was first born, we lived with my parent for the first year, and we lived in this room, mural and all. So this is effectively the nursery room art. I wonder what kind of psychological effect that might have?

When I was in high school, there was a period where denim jackets with painted designs on the back were big. A guy in my high school had asked me if I do a jacket of The Wall (having heard of or seen my mural). I said sure I could, and I think I told him I would charge him $50. I drew up a preliminary design, but he he lost interest at some point.

These murals were painted directly on the sheetrock, which meant it eventually was painted over and the house sold. If I knew as much about sheetrock as I do today, I would have certainly tried to preserve it.