a long-gone mural @ ne 15th & burnside

So a fun thing about losing track of old draft blog posts is that occasionally the subject of the post no longer exists when I circle back to the post again. This happens a lot with murals in Portland; other than a few city-owned ones, there's no expectation they'll stick around for the long term, and usually no budget to touch them up as they age. Some fade away, while others fall prey to vandals, developers, or others located somewhere along the vandal/developer spectrum. Then there are a few spots around town where every so often they just have someone come in and paint a new and different mural over the current one, which is what happened here. Where "here" means one side of the Columbia Art & Drafting Supply building, at NE 15th & Burnside. So the one shown here was painted in 2013 by Portland artist Ashley Montague and was apparently just called "Columbia art mural". And, well, that's all I can really tell you about it, to be honest.

Montague painted a second mural on the same building a few months later that went by "Visual Guardians", which drew a bit more attention at the time, maybe because of the large tiger. It featured in a 2014 r/Portland Reddit thread that in turn links to an Imgur photo of it being painted in late 2013. I somehow got the idea it was called "Beastmaster", thanks to someone else's Flickr photos that I ran across, and did a post about it under that name. So it's about a long-gone mural, under the wrong name, and the embedded "Beastmaster" (1982) movie trailer I included due to the wrong name is now a dead link. Which -- if nothing else -- is an impressive amount of brokenness and wrongness for such a brief post.

A comment on the "Beastmaster" post says the mural had been replaced sometime before November 2016, while current (as of right now) Street View imagery is dated June 2019 and shows what the building's 3 mural spots looked like at that point. If they're on something like a 3 year rotation, they may have cycled through up to 3 new designs since I took the photos here. Which is fine, of course; I'm just mentioning this in case anyone still thinks this little website here is some sort of slick, professional breaking news and current events operation. This may be hard to believe, but we (as in, I) don't even have a single news helicopter. Strange but true.

City Bikes Annex mural

A 2013 Ashley Montague mural at City Bikes on SE Ankeny, much more skeleton-y than the mural on their main building nearby.

Beastmaster

The next mural we're visiting is an Ashley Montague one at NE 15th & Burnside, dated 2014. I don't know much about this one; the mural guy on Flickr who I find a lot of these things through calls it "Beastmaster". That may be its actual name, or it may just be a series of cheesy sword & sorcery movies starring Marc Singer and a bunch of ferrets:

Updated 11/30/2021: If anyone's still watching this old post for updates, today is finally your lucky day. I just finished a long-forgotten draft post about another mural that once graced the same building, a few feet away from the one in this post, and photographed a few minutes before or after it (both were painted over years ago, possibly before I hit 'publish' on the post you're looking at now. As I explain over in the new post, the mural with the tiger here was actually called "Visual Guardians", and never had anything at all to do with the 1982 film, its two sequels, or the syndicated TV series that followed. That said, the embedded movie trailer above had become a broken link -- as unofficial posts of movie trailers often do -- so I went ahead and fixed it anyway, since fixing broken links is one small part of the long twilight struggle against entropy and the eventual heat death of the universe. In fact, thanks to the, uh, magic of finding random junk on Youtube, I can now present to you the trailer to the second film, plus the opening credits for the third one and the TV show. You're welcome.

Dreaming Realities

The next mural up is Dreaming Realities, a 2010 Ashley Montague mural on a weird old building at NE 6th & Failing. This was listed on the RACC's now-defunct Murals of Portland site [link goes to an archive.org copy], but nowhere else that I've come across, including the main RACC website. That's often a sign that a mural's been painted over since the list was compiled, but it looks like this one just sort of fell off the radar somehow. So here it is.

Swift Lounge mural

The next mural up is at Swift Lounge on NE Broadway around 19th, sort of across the street from the building with the Mary Stephens Rose, which is what I was actually looking for when I bumped into this. It was painted in 2012 by Ashley Montague, and features (among other things) a bunch of Vaux's swifts, which are the weird little birds that roost in the Chapman School chimney every fall.

Swift-watching has become a popular activity in Portland since the birds adopted the Chapman chimney some time in the 1990s. Crowds gather at the school at dusk to watch vast clouds of strange little birds swirl and vanish into the school's chimney. A friend who's an avid birdwatcher dragged me along to watch the swifts several years ago, so I can attest that it looks just as bizarre in person as it does on YouTube. The high point of the evening, though, was when a hungry peregrine falcon showed up, looking to pick off one of the countless swifts for a meal. This seemed to generally distress the crowd, and there were even a few scattered boos here and there. I was a distinct minority in rooting for the falcon. If I was more of an extrovert I would have tried explaining that we were witnessing the world's fastest bird in action, and I would have mentioned the inspiring comeback story about DDT and eggshells and the Endangered Species Act and urban falcons. And if that failed, maybe resorting to the "Circle of Life" song from The Lion King would do the trick. I mean, it's not as if swifts are gentle vegetarian birds either. But, as I said, I'm not quite extroverted enough to try all that with strangers, even when they aren't self-righteous Subaru-driving Portlanders.

Take Flight

Our next stop on the ongoing mural project is in the middle of the Pearl District. The Pearl as a whole isn't home to a lot of murals. It's full of shiny new condo towers these days, and no self-respecting condo HOA would ever let someone paint on their building. The very idea is laughable. The south end of the Pearl is still home to some older buildings, though, many with big blank walls, and at least one has sprouted a mural recently. The Low Brow Lounge is a dive bar at NW 10th & Hoyt; I'm not sure how old it actually is, but it seems like a relic of the Pearl's old days as a blue-collar light industrial area, full of auto shops and plumbing supply stores and so forth. One wall is now home to the striking owl mural you see here. This is Take Flight, a new Ashley Montague mural painted in October 2014. I'm sure someday this block will become another cookie-cutter tower for the $500 pinot noir crowd, but until then there's at least a cool owl to look at, and the lounge reportedly fries a mean tater tot.

For those of you keeping score at home, I don't actually know whether Take Flight is an official title; wiredforsound23 on Flickr used that name, and he appears to generally know what he's talking about, street art-wise. So I'm going with that in the absence of anything more definitive, just because I need to call this post something.

Cardboard Castle mural (2)

The second mural of the trio at the Cardboard Castle building (4703 N. Albina) is on the south side of the building, facing the Albina Press coffee shop (which is home to a couple of murals of its own). Unlike the other two, this one wasn't part of a Forest for the Trees event. It was created in 2013 by Ashley Montague, who also did one of the murals across the street, and co-created the one at Refuge PDX, among other things.

I usually introduce a blog tag for somebody's work after about the third thing of theirs I've written about (i.e. the post you're reading now), and there are a couple of other Montague murals my giant omnibus todo list that I'll probably track down sooner or later. And voila, here it is.

I have sort of a theory that the presence of one mural attracts additional murals to the immediate vicinity. The intersection of N. Albina & Blandena is probably an extreme case, but here the first mural went up on the coffee shop in 2005. A few years passed, then this one arrived in 2013, and 2014 saw three more: Two more on the Cardboard Castle building, and one more on the Albina Press building. It may be sort of like tattoos: Somebody gets one, they like the look of it, and decide to get more of them. On the aforementioned giant todo list, I know of a couple of dense clusters of murals along NE Alberta and along Hawthorne, and I know of exactly one along equally hip Williams Ave. and none at all along Mississippi. There could be other factors obviously; Mississippi may just have a dearth of suitable walls, or property owners who won't play ball, or a really uptight neighborhood association. Or maybe it's just waiting for someone to paint the first one, and then the whole street will go wild.

Refuge PDX Mural

The next mural on our tour is on the Refuge PDX building, at SE Yamhill and railroad-only 1st Avenue. This was painted in 2011, a collaboration between Ashley Montague (who did the Albina Press Garage Mural that appeared here a few days ago) and Joshua Mays.

That's pretty much all I know about this one. It's about a block from the Hair of the Dog brewery, so I saw it regularly well before I had any idea of doing a mural project, and I sort of idly wondered what the deal was with it. Somehow it never occurred to me to google it or even check to see what sort of business was in the building. This kind of illustrates what I always say about my powers of observation. If I'm looking for a category of something (public sculptures, waterfalls, old highway milestones, brewpubs, now murals), I do an extremely thorough job of it, finding them no matter how obscure they are. But if it's not something I'm keeping an eye out for at the time, it'll probably just blow right past me without even registering. I suppose that's part of the value of taking on a new project every so often, so I have to take a fresh look at what's around me now and then.

Albina Press Garage Mural

The next mural we're visiting is the Albina Press Garage Mural, on N. Blandena St. at Albina Ave., on a garage behind the Albina Press coffee shop (home to the Life Cycle of a Sun Flower mural panels). It was created in May 2014 by muralist Ashley Montague, who describes the design: "Thoughts behind this were about infinite knowledge… the owl is representing that. Inside of each of us we have this knowledge, its just tapping into it."

Call me a child of the 1970s if you like, but this design would look kind of awesome on a groovy custom van. And I don't even mean that in a ha-ha ironic sense. Add some shag carpets, curtains on the windows, 8-track player... It's hard to explain. Maybe you had to have been there.