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Marked Arts

While the Bearinger Fireproof Building undergoes the planning for its rebirth, Mark Piotrowski of MARKedARTs gave the 127-year-old building a splash of color.

“I’ve always been attracted to abstraction, movement, and color,” says Piotrowski, “and working large is something I gravitate towards.”

The mural on the Bearinger is all of those things; waves of colors bend and wrap across two complete sides of the building.

“Where the mural is on the building was all broken glass, particle, holes punched into metal,” he says. “I patched all that up, and even just putting down the white primer so I could paint on it was such an improvement.”

The inspiration for the mural came from a painting Piotrowski had been working on for about a year.

“Jamie Forbes had told me that Jenifer Acosta was looking for someone to do some art on the building. She was very supportive and had a vision of oranges and blues. I was doing some drawings, and kept thinking ‘Oranges and blues? Where have I seen that before?’ And it was there right in front of me in my studio...a big orange and blue painting.”

Piotrowski began taking pictures of the painting and rearranging the shots inside the windows of a mock-up of the building. The mural flows across doors, inside windows, and jumps across bricks and stone.

“Public art makes something become part of the community rather than just an empty area,” Piotrowski says. “Art is part of the fabric of our every day lives. Everything we do has some kind of creative thought behind it: there is an art to cooking, to folding your sheets.

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