Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 26, 1995 TAG: 9506260093
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Big Al is a man-mountain. He is the World Trade Center, with legs and paint brush. He is three Picassos.
He is three anythings.
He is several of any of the willowy young painters from Roanoke-area high schools who on a day last week were putting the finishing touches - under Big Al's close supervision - to a mural which by now should be hanging outside Center in the Square.
Truth is, Al won't say exactly how big he is.
"Why do they always ask that?" he protested when a reporter asked for his dimensions.
Allen "Big Al" Carter is an artist. A big one.
Working last week on the mural, which has a Roanoke Valley theme, he seemed somehow larger than the 24 x 8 foot mural itself - which lay in several pieces over much of the floor of a large work room at the Art Museum of Western Virginia.
Lurching around the room in his paint-smeared apron, occasionally filling the air with short bursts of sound from his harmonica, Big Al was not only big, he was clearly in charge.
"I think his cheek should be sticking out more," opined one young artist, female. She was looking critically at a man on the left side of the mural, who was blowing a horn.
"No," Big Al says. "That's just right."
Discussion over.
Big Al knows. He's done lots of murals.
An art teacher for Fairfax County schools, Big Al began doing murals more than a decade ago in Washington, D.C., to offer kids there an alternative to the streets. Big Al has a degree in fine arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio.
In recent years, Big Al has worked on murals with talented kids in Raleigh, Winston-Salem and Charlotte, N.C., and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
It was a mural project he did for the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts that caught the Roanoke museum's attention.
"We thought that would be a great thing for us to do," said Mark Scala, the museum's curator of contemporary art. Big Al's fee - Scala would confirm only that the project was "expensive" - was paid through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Norfolk Southern Foundation.
In addition to the mural project, Big Al's paintings are on exhibit in the art museum's first floor galleries through Sept. 10.
Like Big Al himself, his paintings attract attention. Big Al likes bright colors -"It makes you stop and look" he explains - big portraits, big gobs of paint and other odds and ends. One painting, if that is the right word, is made with pieces of roofing shingles.
His topics run from nostalgia for his youth in Northern Virginia to gut-wrenching reality - as depicted in the paintings devoted to his mother's struggle with the advanced stages of diabetes (``Take my leg Lord," she pleads in one of them, "but save my life.") There also are paintings of Robert E. Lee - Big Al is a Civil War History buff - and of cats. There are lots of cats.
The viewer searching for underlying meaning in any of his pieces is probably on his own.
"It's a nice piece, man," he said once in response to a reporter's question. "I just look at it like that."
The mural, meanwhile, was painted by the students from a sketch by Big Al. Done with flat expanses of color and heavy black borders - the better to be seen at a distance - it features area landmarks agreed upon during a brainstorming session he and the students conducted together. There is the Hotel Roanoke, and Natural Bridge. A train and an American Indian stand for the region's history. The City Market and its fresh produce is suggested by a farm - and there is a happy-looking blond-haired girl to represent young people.
"I'm really thrilled with the mural," said the art museum's Scala.
The young artists themselves gave their week-long project mixed reviews.
"I like it," said Meghan Blake, a budding watercolorist and rising junior at Cave Spring High School. "I was skeptical ... I think it's going to turn out pretty good."
"I think it's a lot of fun," said Tonya Pickett, a Northside High School junior-to-be, and the mural's train specialist. "I can do them pretty good," she explained of the trains. Pickett said Big Al was nice but demanding - insisting that the mural "is going to be right."
Some students pined for a little more social realism, high-school style.
"It's a little typical, in my opinion," said Cave Spring High School student Mandy Gordham, sitting between two pieces of the mural.
Take that happy blond girl, for instance. "Let's pierce something on her," someone else suggested.
Cave Spring High School senior-to-be Lisa LaPlant thought - no doubt rightly - that the young volunteers deserved some credit.
"Lately young people in Roanoke have really been getting a bad rap," LaPlant said. "We're not all bad."
Big Al said the students had required a firm guiding hand.
"When you control a young person, it comes as a little bit of a shock. ... They're great kids, don't get me wrong. But kids will be kids."
The completed mural was unveiled at a reception at the art museum Saturday.
It will hang on an outside wall of the Center in the Square building above the City Market for the duration of Big Al's exhibit at the art museum.
After that, its future is unsettled.
"It's definitely a piece of public art, Scala said. "I would really like for it to have a high visibility here somewhere."
by CNB