It’s been a smidgen more than a year since a confused driver crashed through the back wall of Sebastopol Hardware last October — and, wow, how things have changed. The store’s co-owner Dan Allingham said that there was enough insurance money left over after the wall was fixed to hire famed Bay Area muralist Maxfield Bala to do an expansive mural on the long, windowless stretch of the building that faces Starbucks and the back end of the Redwood Marketplace.
Allingham said he’d seen and admired Bala’s work in Petaluma. “I knew he was the one we wanted,” he said.
Bala said they started talking about the mural in January, but it took a while to get it on his schedule. “I’m trying to juggle so many projects—it took about nine months for us to be able to actually get here on site and paint it,” said Bala, who’s excited to finally be doing a mural in Sebastopol.
“This is my first permanent project here, which is really great because I love Sebastopol,” he said, noting that he’d previously done a mini mural in the Barlow that was up for just a few months. “I’ve had the opportunity to paint murals in Santa Rosa and throughout Sonoma County, but not here in Sebastopol. So this will be a really fun kind of inaugural piece, and hopefully it turns into a few more projects.”
Bala started painting the mural—beginning with a rough sketch on the wall and then the painting of the enormous apple—in early September. He expects to be finished in a few days.
Bala, who has a BA in business administration from Sonoma State, said he has loved art since he was a child.
“I always had a huge passion for it,” he said. “I was, you know, drawing on the side of homework assignments and doing whatever I could to be able to paint and draw.”
He had a few gallery shows early on, but found the economic prospects of a life in the fine art world daunting.
“I really just started to doubt,” he said. “I loved the interaction that gallery shows gave me with that community of people and the patrons of the gallery show, but then I really realized that murals could make a huge impact for people who didn’t visit a gallery and weren’t into that. With murals, they can be seen by thousands of people a day. Murals really enliven the community. They really can change and transform a space, and I love that.”
Bala started his mural business in 2015, doing projects on small, blank walls wherever he could find them, building up his portfolio. “And then it turned into the snowball effect, where I was able to meet creative directors and create an entire business around mural painting and sign painting. Over the last decade, I have been able to paint murals around the world and around the country.”
He created the Sebastopol Hardware mural with an art spray paint called Montana Gold spray paint.
“It’s very fine. It’s almost like using an airbrush. Over the decades, I’ve learned so many different techniques of layering and how you can use that spray paint to get fine lines or blends, and you just overlap color over and over and over again until you really get a solidified, refined image,” he said. “I will use a little bit of acrylic just for minor touch-ups and a little bit of detail here and there.”
Allingham emphasized that the mural isn’t an advertisement for the store. He conceived of it as more a gift for the community. Even though the history of the store is encoded in the mural—the store’s iconic farm truck, a paint can, and, soon, an image capturing the word “smile,” which was painted on the store when it first opened in 1965—it doesn’t feel like an ad.
“We went through a lot of different design concepts,” Bala said, “but the goal of the piece was really to be able to highlight Sebastopol and create a mural that was for the community, and part of doing that was also highlighting a little bit of Ace Hardware’s history here in the community as well.”
“The design is actually strictly a curation of the artist,” Allingham said. “We gave him some input about our store and Sebastopol’s history—apples, the Gravenstein apple, our 1965 start, the original Smile Hardware. You’ll see there’s an homage. The biggest thing is it doesn’t say Sebastopol Hardware. It’s not an advertisement. It just says mural. It says Sebastopol. It’s for all Sebastopol.”
Great mural and excellent story! Thank you Dan Allingham for sponsoring this wonderful piece of public art. I would love to see more murals in Sebastopol. Perhaps, the City's Public Arts Committee could sponsor a mural in Ives or on the Youth Annex.
Wow that is my favorite store! I've got to go see that art!