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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

The Art Wall

Most houses or schools have a blank wall in a hallway or basement that attracts fingerprints and is hard to keep clean anyway. Every house needs a wall that can be worked on. Ever since we had children, we have had a wall for them in the basement. The wall is 8 feet by 10 feet long where paintings, scribbles, drawings, birthday wishes, cartoons, doodles, are sandwiched between layers of papier mache and coats of paint. When the wall becomes saturated with images and words, a fresh coat of paint or paper made everything new again for new words and feelings...A home or school without a wall to work on is depriving its inhabitants of a privilege that even primitive man had when he drew pictographs on the walls of caves.




Last Saturday, I had an opportunity to meet Reinhold's son, Karl Marxhausen. We looked at Reinhold's mural in the campus center and talked about the work on the blog. I also had a chance to watch Karl do some filming. This is the wall in the home where Marxhausen raised his kids. Karl also filmed the mural in Jones bank and Janzow campus center. What I like about Karl's films is that they show details a regular photograph can't. Even if you got the opportunity to look at one of these works up close (which I'd encourage you to try if you get the chance) you might not notice some of the small details Karl focuses on in his videos.