VALLEY VISION

WASILLA — Teachers and students at Fred and Sara Machetanz Elementary School have a whole new reason to anticipate the start of school Aug. 17.

Adorning the school’s main hallway is a new 100-foot long mural created by Alaska artist Kevin G. Smith that curves along the face of the mezzanine between the school’s first and second floors and traces the modern history of the Matanuska Valley.

Smith said he spent more than a year driving around the area looking for the people and places he eventually included in the eye-catching mural replete with oversized sandhill cranes, too big musk ox and a nearly life-sized black bear that peers from behind Palmer’s iconic water tower.

He said he started the process with a workshop at the school where he showed students and staff examples of other murals he’s created and asked them to tell him what they’d like on their walls.

“Everything they suggested is in it,” Smith said. “Rainbows, eagles, moose — if it’s up there, it’s part of their list.”

He said he created the image using several panoramic shots of the mountains from various locations around the Valley and then added other layers.

While some critics lament photography as merely a documentary art form, Smith uses a sense of scale and modern computer software to play with the boundaries between realism and the surreal.

That’s why in one panel a sandhill crane strides through a field, dwarfing a man using a team of horses to plow. Or another that features a purple iris that is taller than the giant cabbage next to it with the Cabbage Fairies pictured on its heart.

“I like to play with a sense of scale,” Smith said.

The Machetanz mural is Smith’s eighth and was funded through the state’s 1 Percent for Art Program.

Other murals he’s created are in Akiak, Akiachak, Tuluksak, Deering, Noatak, Shungnak and on the floor of Anchorage Fire Station No. 4.

He said he used computer software to layer the more than 100 images and stitch them all together into a 100-foot mural that was then printed by Graphicworks of Anchorage on 4-foot sections of vinyl wallpaper.

It took Smith and Victor Alexander from Graphicworks 1.5 days last week to install the mural and accompanying cloth banners that feature images with such detail shots as grass covered in water droplets and a shot of broken ice on top of a mud puddle.

“I want to encourage kids to be more aware of their environment,” Smith said.

And if you think you recognize some of the people in the mural, you’re right. The farmer driving the tractor is Ted Pyrah from Pyrah’s Pioneer Peak Farm and the girls working in the fields are Indigo Beck, Rachel Silverstein and Katie Sullivan.

Smith said he was shooting panoramic images of the mountains from the top of the Butte when he met Ted Pyrah’s daughter Janet (Pyrah) Dinwiddie, who assured him her dad would be happy to help him with farming photos.

“All of the people in the mural are people I met along the way,” Smith said.

He said he owes special thanks to Arthur Keyes at Glacier Valley Farm, Ted Pyrah at Pyrah’s Pioneer Peak Farm, Michael Kircher at APU’s Spring Hill Farm, Mark Austin at the Musk Ox Farm and Wesley Grover for granting him access to take pictures on their farms.

After school starts, Smith said he will return to Machetanz Elementary to talk to students and staff about how the mural was put together. Toward that end, he set up a camera to take a photo every 30 seconds throughout the installation process, which he said he’ll turn into a video to show students the process.

“I try to tell a place’s story with imagery,” Smith said. “Using modern day and historical photographs gives me a wider chronological context to work with and contrast the changes that have happened since the advent of the photographic process.”

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.