Dave Dietz Ice & Flowers - McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania - Murals on Waymarking.com

mural is on the side of a building, currently used by a flower business. The image on the mural depicts a horse-drawn ice wagon in front of a store, in a streetscape scene.


[more info from a column that appeared on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, by Gene Collier, 04/28/2002]:
Mural, mural off-the-wall

Sunday, April 28, 2002

We were standing in the high grass across from the pawn shop on Chartiers Avenue in McKees Rocks, Jim and Matt and I.

It was midday, when the sun slices this empty lot into two long rectangles. It was there, in the shaded half, where Jim sat in the weeds for half an hour one day holding a large black-and-white photograph of a horse-drawn ice wagon, circa 1910, and staring at the massive cement plane that is the side wall of Dave Dietz Florist.

He sat there pretty much transfixed.

"Wondering where the horse's ass goes," Jim said.

That's how the mural started. With an equine focal point.

"If I put his model bay rump right there, big and round with the sunshine illuminating it, it might make you want to pet him -- horses are so cool -- then you'd have the beginnings of perspective. The horse's head is then farther in the distance."

I nodded the vague validation of the clueless. Matt aimed a trained gaze at the mural.

"You know who devised these rules? Furniture makers in the Renaissance," Jim said. "Wrote all the rules of perspective."

When I want to pretend to understand art, but far more important, to understand the fluid tyranny of the artist's existence, I find Jim Levendosky down in the Rocks. Artist, Renaissance man, philosopher and 1986 Ford truck owner, Jim is about to be squeezed into the next phase of the artist's life. Again.

The mural has to be finished this weekend because negotiations with his Helen Street landlord and the building owner have broken down. His studio that contains most of a life's work will go back in the preposterous yellow truck tomorrow or the next day, and he'll be rolling toward one of his occasional summer gigs selling his art in Eastport, Maine.

But when he leaves home this time, there'll be a lot more to remember him by, such as this massive ice wagon mural that four weeks ago was nothing but the cloud-gray side wall of Dave Dietz's. Fifteen feet high at the sidewalk and 40 feet deep, it was arranged by the McKees Rocks Planning Commission under Taris Vrcek, with a grant from American Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh.

It is Levendosky's art ("I don't know what it is: I think I've applied Renaissance techniques to social realism"), but its legacy might well be entrusted to the young artists of Sto-Rox High School, five of whom have helped in exchange for instruction. Matt Peters, a 16-year-old sophomore, was on a ladder there, fleshing out figures of the five students whom Levendosky had draw themselves into the mural.

"Try not to think too much when you're doing this," Jim told Matt. "It's a choreography between your will and this wall. Your hand is the dancer. The idea is to see the genius of an accident, and then fill it in."

Jim mounted the ladder to demonstrate. He splashed the flesh tones. The figures suddenly got legs. And depth.

"But the perspective," Matt said. "This figure looks too tall to me."

"No," Jim said. "Those figures are conforming to different layers of perspective."

Five students worked on this project -- one on weekdays and the whole gang weekends. Though Jim is much more inclined to list the things he has to be humble about than to drift toward self-satisfaction, he has absorbed something tangibly meaningful from these four weeks.

"The arts-and-crafts kids in school, they're not in with the social climbers," he said. "They don't have anywhere to go after school. I hope this mural is the start of continued funding for arts projects for kids. If you wanted to build a basketball court or a football stadium, of course, everybody would be behind it, but never for art."

Such is the hope of the planning commission, which is trying to secure funding to keep Levendosky in town to oversee another mural, beneath the railroad trestle on Route 51. But Jim will probably be in Old Yella headed for New England before that happens.

"I'd love to stay and do it," he said. "Imagine coming around the bend on 51 and seeing a nine-foot lizard's head staring at you. Would that be cool?"

Yeah, that'd be.

City: McKees Rocks Location Name: Dave Dietz Flowers Artist: Jas Levendosky Media: acrylic on cement wall Date: Not listed Relevant Web Site: Not listed

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