92Two Faces on North 26th
Two murals on one storefront under a red steel awning, North 26th Street · brush and spray on painted brick and plaster · artist and year unknown — know who painted these? Tell us.MURAL
One corner store, two faces, no signature anywhere. A gold profile with its eyes shut among blue blooms, and a portrait somebody stopped painting.
This is the kind of wall the big mural maps miss. A neighborhood corner store on North 26th, red steel posts holding up a corrugated awning, and painted straight onto the brick between the windows: a face in profile, eyes closed, done in gold against a sweep of deep purple. Big blooms in teal and blue crowd in around it, a spray of magenta petals fans out under the chin like a collar, and a small red bird hovers right at the lips, wings back, as if it has just arrived. To the right the ground goes black and green leaves reach in from the edge.
A few feet down the same front there is a second painting, and it is a different hand or a different day. A man’s head and shoulders on a pale ground, framed by vertical bands of yellow, white and blue. His face is finished — the furrowed brow, the eyes, the beginning of a smile — and finished with real care. Everything below his chin is pencil line and a flat block of tan, and there is still a strip of blue painter’s tape along the top edge, so he reads as a portrait somebody meant to come back to and never did.
We cannot find a name for either one. There is no signature on the wall and no tag in a corner. That happens more than you would think: a good deal of Waco’s painting is a handshake between a shop owner and somebody who can paint, and the record of it is the wall itself. If you know who did these, we would genuinely like to put the name here.
More views
