Out of sight: Hurley’s newest mural is ambitious and well hidden
David Hurley in front of a mural he painted over the course of 7 months in an airplane hangar at Belfast Municipal Airport. (Photo by Ethan Andrews)
A wide view of the airplane hangar showing the first of four phases of the mural. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
A work in progress. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
Hurley, right, and Russell Kahn in front of the finished mural. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
The airplane belonging to Michael Sobota, who commissioned the mural inside his hangar at Belfast Municipal Airport. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
One of two helicopters included in the mural. Hurley said photos of the aircraft were projected onto the wall initially, but getting the correct perspective and size was still a challenge. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
Detail (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
Detail of the flight school plane. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
Detail. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
David Hurley in front of a mural he painted over the course of 7 months in an airplane hangar at Belfast Municipal Airport. (Photo by Ethan Andrews)
A wide view of the airplane hangar showing the first of four phases of the mural. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
A work in progress. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
Hurley, right, and Russell Kahn in front of the finished mural. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
The airplane belonging to Michael Sobota, who commissioned the mural inside his hangar at Belfast Municipal Airport. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
One of two helicopters included in the mural. Hurley said photos of the aircraft were projected onto the wall initially, but getting the correct perspective and size was still a challenge. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
Detail (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
Detail of the flight school plane. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
Detail. (Photo courtesy of David Hurley)
BELFAST - It's hard to imagine David Hurley being intimidated by a request to paint a mural.
In downtown Belfast, his depictions of cats poised in windowsills and doorways are seemingly everywhere. Outside Alexia’s Pizza, Hurley painted owner Ted Rakis sharing a slice of pizza with an alien. Inside the restaurant, he completed another artist’s unfinished a mural of Spartan soldier by turning his upraised shield into a pizza being pummeled by a meteor shower of toppings, while tourists linger by the Acropolis in the background.
After years of imagining the rear corner of a strip mall behind the post office as the prow of a ship, he got the owner’s permission to paint a porthole, an anchor and a spray of waves on it. He rechristened it the S.S. Belfast.
But when he was asked to paint a scene on an interior wall of a hangar at Belfast Municipal Airport last winter, he confessed some anxiety.
The requirements of the owner, Michael Sobota, were fairly loose. “He wanted seven planes and two helicopters,” Hurley said. “My job was to make it interesting to look at.”
What worried Hurley was the proposed size: 23-feet wide and 13-feet high, starting five feet above the floor. Aside from the S.S. Belfast, which he put in a different category, the dozens of murals he had painted over the years had always been much smaller.
Over a period of seven months, Hurley and a fellow painter Russell Kahn would log 450 hours inside the hangar. The mural was done in four phases, each comprising a complete section of the painting. Along the way, Hurley said he was constantly second guessing himself. Each session felt like “another day to screw it up,” he said.
He waited for complaints about his invoices. He waited for Sobota to pull the plug on the project. But Hurley said his patron always seemed excited by the progress on the mural.
After a certain amount of this, Hurley had a revelation. He was getting paid to do something he loved.
“How many people have had the opportunity to stand on a scaffold and ...” He stopped mid-sentence and painted a few brushstrokes in the air. “And have a patron?” he said.
“It seemed so different from what I’ve done, but when you hear about people who get commissions, it’s like, it’s there. People have money.”
Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com
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