Lia Morsell

Roundman’s Smokehouse commissioned and funded this mural. Their only request was for a compact design that represented our part of the coast.

Nicola chose the elements of a whale and a forest because they are two of her favorite things in the area. She was born in Scotland, but moved to the Bay Area as a teenager, and then up to Chico. She’s only sort of joking when she says she moved to Fort Bragg from Chico to get away from the sunshine. Mostly, she just missed living near a coast.

“As a kid in Scotland you can see whales off the coast, so it was pretty neat to come to the other side of the planet and see the same thing. The oceans are all quite  interconnected. I liked the idea of portraying the biological interconnectedness of these two adjacent but very different ecosystems, the oceans and the redwoods. In my experience living hee, it feels like the ocean and forest are on top of each other..”

From November to February, the California Gray Whales can be seen migrating south to Baja. There, the pregnant females give birth. Starting in February and March, the whales migrate back north to Alaska with their newborn calves.

There are lots of great places to watch whales, but my personal favorite is from the very tip of MacKerricher state park’s boardwalk out on the headlands.

Those white dots on the whale’s back are barnacles. There is one species of barnacle and three species of whale lice that live on the gray whale. The barnacle (Cryptolepas rhachianecti) is unique to the gray whale, and of the three species of whale lice (in the genus Cyamus), two are found only on gray whales.

Here’s some more about grey whales from our friends at the Noyo Center for Marine Science

Art Explorers, Inc. is a non-profit creative arts program in Fort Bragg, California, that serves adult artists with developmental disabilities and brain injuries. We currently have an enrollment of 36 students, including some who have been participating for over 20 years. We have a spacious studio and gallery in the downtown area, where we exhibit and sell artwork on an on-going basis. We operate a 5-day a week program. Our funding comes from the Redwood Coast Regional Center and donations from the public.

Art is a universal, non-verbal language, without definite rules or restrictions. Our mission is to provide a fun, artistically stimulating environment for creativity to thrive, where people with disabilities are welcomed and accepted as artists. We nurture each individual artist to follow their passion, to discover the right art materials, and to find their own unique style and voice. Our studio is an uplifting, magical place…creating art together gives people a sense of purpose, and promotes camaraderie. This helps to combat the isolation that’s inherently part of the lives of many. We believe that art transforms lives, and opens the window to the deepest expression and yearnings of the human spirit. For more information or to make a donation, please visit our website: www.artexplorers.org

If you are standing in front of these three murals, the Art Explorers studio is right across the street to your left, at 333 Franklin. They are open Tuesday- Saturdays 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. Go say hi and see what the artists are working on this week.

This is Jason’s vision of the COVID virus. Unlike the green blob with red dots, which can seem to connote malevolent stickiness, Jason depicts it as a passive cloud of, mechanical programming. Often our language around viruses can anthropomorphize them, as if they are “looking for a new host.” In truth, they are simple biological systems, passively transported to environments where they infect and replicate, or inhospitable locations where they are destroyed by the elements. In 2020, they loom over the landscape like the low clouds of an approaching storm.

The crocodile is a reference to the health alert levels of yellow, orange, red and purple that were used to communicate the rates of infection within Mendocino county. Like many of us, Jason distinctly remembers  watching with increasing alarm as we edged closer and closer into the purple zone.

Jason was inspired by mural fragments found in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan. Check out the De Young’s incredible collection here.

Virus particulate drifts out of the crocodile’s mouth, curling towards flowers, abalone, starfish, California poppies, and a child in a mask, a reference to the phase of the pandemic when we hadn’t yet fully identified the virus’s methods of transmission or persistence on surfaces. Every footstep outside the house felt suffused with risk.

This alarmed creature with it’s head in a glass bell is a reference to the feeling of moon-suit sensory deprivation feeling you can get when walking around wearing a mask, glasses, and often earpods.

It’s also a direct reference to Heironymous Bosch’s famous tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted 1490-1500AD.
​As the daily fear and anxiety of 2020 gave way to pandemic exhaustion in 2021, many people tried to reestablish social connections through small group pods, with varying degrees of success.

Jason remembers feeling like one strange creature out of many, drifting across the landscape of Fort Bragg, greeting friends from inside a self-imposed bubble of personal space.

The bubonic plague or Black Death swept through Europe in waves of infection and re-infection between 1345 and 1353. Though Bosch’s famous work is a warning against sinfulness and lust, it was within the context of a society still reeling from a pandemic catastrophe which seemed to the people at the time to choose its victims at random. Many people then, like now, chose to confront the randomness by throwing caution to the wind and living for maximum pleasure.