Live Painting Commission, Deadline: ASAP

A professor at the University of Portland Theater is looking to hire an artist for an upcoming “Zoom Theatre” live painting, an illustration inspired by spoken-word poetry. This is a project on a short timeline and must be completed by Sunday, November 8, 2020 at the latest.

The commissioned artist will be asked to illustrate a written poem in their mural (see below). The artist will be filmed creating the mural. This video will serve as the visuals for the virtual show. The painting and filming will be done at the Mago Hunt Center at the University of Portland. They would like the artist to sketch the design first, send that for review, and allow for feedback and revisions. The virtual show will be “performed” over Zoom on November 13, 2020.

Everyone is welcome to apply, especially artists of color, those who work in graffiti-art styles, and who have deep roots in Portland.

Budget: Up to $500

To Apply: Please send your work portfolio to Lezlie at crossl@up.edu

Scene 1: The Rose (panel one)
Consider the rose.
Beautiful flowers that grow all together in a garden
Their patch, small in size, accommodated flourishing roses of all varieties:
Red, pink, white, peach, yellow, purple, a spectrum of beauty.
Some roses imperfect, striped or splotched, but never blighted.
Always growing, drinking in the light from the sun.
On the sunny days of summer, the bees buzzed and drank the sweet nectar that came from the roses,
On the days where it rained, the roses drank up the sweet water that came from the sky.
The garden was fragrant with the blossoms’ intoxicating odor.
Down below the ground, the roots intertwined,
No rose took more than its share. No rose took less, there was enough.
Consider the rose, a plethora of colors, a rainbow of blossoms, unique to their own.
In all soils, still they grew.

Scene 4: The Holly (panel two)
Consider the holly, with its red toxic berries, that grows and creeps and chokes.
At first its beauty is enticing.
With reds and greens, reminiscent but not complete.
The holly is uniform, tall, and ordered. Perfect like houses all in a row, manufactured.
Sometimes the holly chokes itself out.
Too many spindles and vines, thrashing and taking and trampling.
One small root is all it takes to suck life from the ground,
The roots feast upon the soil, trapping the nutrients in their waxy leaves, enclosed and imprisoned.
As the holly extends its limbs, its bitterness grows.
Berries, leaves, and vines all toxic, never sweet.
Tearing the garden apart.
Thorn by thorn, leaf by leaf, blossom by blossom.
Until all that is left is a monolith of toxicity and normalcy, nothing new, nothing old.
Perfectly stagnant and still.
Yet, a single rose in the center of the garden endures.
One rose, who climbed up the fences, reaching, searching for the sun.
And as the rose struggled to survive, it looked back on the garden, a sea of green and red berries, and did not recognize a thing.
Consider the holly. Beautiful in its own right, but uniform in all ways.

Scene 9: Final Rose Poem (panel three)
The roses remained.
Here they are, sequestered on a plot even smaller than the last.
Each rose strong alone but always stronger together.
Their colors, a symbol of resistance, against the monolithic green and red of the Holly.
Their existence a bloom of defiance, their beauty a seed planted for what once was theirs.
For they knew the roses before them had made the ground strong and rich.
No matter how far the Holly crawled, no matter where they were replanted,
The Roses refused to wither, shining with their spectrum of colors, their sweet nectars and intoxicating fragrance,
And little by little,
Thorn by thorn,
Leaf by leaf,
Blossom by blossom,
The roses came back.
Perhaps not in the same plots,
Or even in the same Garden,
But the Roses remained,
And the Roses were beautiful.

This announcement was originally shared by Portland Street Art Alliance.