Next time you walk down Congress Street in Portland, stop and look in the window of SPACE Gallery at 538 Congress. The latest urban mural by San Francisco artist Andrew J. Schoultz will be taking shape throughout the month of April at the gallery.
Schoultz is an urban muralist who has worked on projects around the country as well as internationally. He draws on graffiti art and underground comics to portray the economic, environmental and personal pressures of urban life.
As a traveling artist, Schoultz interweaves his own unique, graffiti-inspired approach with the subtle influence of whatever community he happens to be stationed in. Portland has him this month, courtesy of funding from Bates College and the Portland Public Art Committee.
Despite the towering scale of his art, Schoultz has a low-key approach to conveying his ideas. “People don’t want the message slammed in your face,” he said. He seems perfectly content to make his peaceable statement — it’s just that sometimes that statement is seventeen feet high and more than a city block long.
A thoroughly urban artist, he uses buildings, scrap wood and any other surfaces that strike his eye to portray his art. A close scrutiny of his artistic elements reveals a moralistic purpose interspersed with whimsical images.
Birdhouses, trees, elephants and flocks of birds are among the many figures he depicts in his works. Each has its own identity, as well as its own symbolic meaning reflecting how the artist sees his world.
“I create this iconic cartoon world to tell human stories,” Schoultz said, standing before the wide, ceiling-high expanse of his latest work-in-progress at SPACE.
As it is now, the piece gives a peek at how the artist constructs his murals and uses his space. One of Schoultz’s signature birdhouses nestles on top of a sinewy tree trunk with chopped off limbs. “I’m going to have growth behind it, sprouting out,” Schoultz says. “Even though the tree’s limbs are cut off, nature still is powerful and still grows.”
On the opposite end of the mural is a fully constructed hurricane, its gray coils spinning crazily. Schoultz says he wants to show the awesome power of nature and how it can be unleashed.
An active environmentalist and vegetarian, Schoultz finds his passion in the process of painting. He has a paint-as-you-go style, rather than a paint-by-numbers approach where everything is mapped out in advance. He has been making murals for over ten years, each one taking up to four weeks to complete. The end result often lasts about 25 years.
Schoultz is also teaching a group of young Sudanese and Somalian teenagers here in Portland, coaching their designs and helping them to construct a separate mural in Portland’s Kennedy Park. He seems to enjoy being a role model for younger artists who originally began with graffiti and want to expand.
Schoultz’s most colossal undertaking to date was in Indonesia. Working through an exchange program with American Clarion Alley Mural Project, he created a giant mural for the city of Yogyakarta.
Other past works of Schoultz’s include “Generator,” a twisted compilation of haphazard buildings, and “All Birds,” which illustrates the humdrum nature of life and the struggle of the individual against the remainder of the flock.
His persistent themes of environmentalism and the fight against conformity are manifested in images like a giant big-footed elephant as the king chess piece, and an assortment of blue pachyderms with smokestack-spouted birdhouses spewing pollution into the air.
Meg Fletcher can be contacted at [email protected]