Even though traffic on Pacific Coast Highway whizzes by Point Dume’s newly rebuilt county fire station at speeds over 50 mph, it’s hard to miss the new tile mural out front.
The vibrantly colored work of art is eight feet tall in some spots, 45 feet long and depicts Malibu scenery while wrapping around a corner of the new station. “Tapestry of Dreams” begins with a brightly colored rolling carpet that turns into the scenery of Malibu.
“I had to be respectful about not doing something too crazy,” local tile artist Matt Doolin said. “I’m surprised at how far they let me go with the bright colors.”
Doolin, co-owner of Topanga Art Tile, spent over eight months designing, creating and installing the new mural. When the county first sent out requests for proposals to artists for the project in 2012, Doolin said he thought, “Wow, this is perfect for me,” even though he knew he’d have plenty of competition.
“I sent a very passionate letter of interest that got me in the door,” Doolin said. “It referred to the local community, the fact that I’ve grown up here and that I’m connected to the local environment by spending a lot of time in Malibu surfing, hiking and camping.”
Doolin also thought it helped that Topanga Art Tile was well known locally after being founded by his mother in 1978, and that he also designed a county project for the Topanga Library in 2006.
Dozens of contenders for the art project were given the opportunity to look at drawings of the future fire station before submitting proposals. The county encouraged submissions by tile artists because of Malibu’s history of manufacturing art tiles, and because of the tilework in the historic Adamson house.
It took a committee of 12 people to review the proposals, including members of county administration, the Malibu community, contractors and the fire department.
“Nature was the big theme that everybody wanted – sun, sand and surf,” Doolin said. “Many times, the theme [for fire station art] is firefighters fighting a fire, and they really wanted something else.”
Malibu Arts Commission member Scott Hosfeld said he really liked the fact that L.A. County “allowed them to be part of the vetting process.” He thinks the finished mural is “gorgeous.”
“The fire department was looking for something that was easy to maintain and out of the way,” Doolin said. “They definitely didn’t want a sculpture [that a fire truck could run over]. I was lucky my design was right on the wall.”
The process of going from pencil drawings to a finished mural was a long one. Working from his Topanga studio, Doolin first enlarged the drawings to the mural’s actual size, then “went back in and did a lot of detailing with rocks and plants. It took a month,” he said.
The 8×45-foot drawing was then sculpted into wet clay in 2×4-foot sections. Over 2,000 individual tiles were handmade — numbered, sanded, finished, painted, glazed and fired. Some tiles had to be fired two to five times to get the right color.
“It was like a jigsaw puzzle in clay,” Doolin said.
The tiles were then transported to the site and installed — a two-month process. Doolin systematically laid them out and set them to the building’s stucco. Then, “cutting, fitting and trimming had to be done. Because I’m working with wet clay, which shrinks about 10 percent when you fire it, it doesn’t always fit perfectly. I had to pull some stuff off the wall and start all over again.”
The finished artwork is not a traditional mosaic in terms of making a picture with little square tiles or chards of glass. Doolin calls it an “orchestrated mosaic” because “each piece is cut and shaped.”
Firefighter Sean Kinsner, when asked about the mural said, “We love it, it’s beautiful. We spoke with the artist quite a few times while he worked on it, and it was painstaking the way he had to change all the grout colors, etc.”
Kinsner also confirmed that when it comes to subject matter, “We’d rather see a Malibu-scape than the stuff we do for a living.”
The artwork is a taxpayer-funded L.A. County Arts Commission project. New county construction projects set aside one-percent of their budget for art. Artists interested in future county art projects can get on the county’s Civic Arts prequalified artist list at lacountyarts.org/civicart.htm.
