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Dj's
Talent Goes Up In Smoke:
Mill Valley, CA 2008 |
| October
31, 2005, Halloween. During that morning Brian and Susie Telford and their
staff at Telford’s Pipe & Cigar in Mill Valley packed up all of
the store’s stock, put it in trucks, and moved it about a mile down
the road to a stand-alone building at 664 Redwood Hwy, where they were open
for business at about 1:00 that very afternoon. About a month or so later
while I was relaxing in one of the over-stuffed, leather armchairs as I
stared at the large empty space on the east wall above a row member’s
lockers, Susie said to me something along the lines of, “You should
paint a mural up there.” So I did.
The first thing I did was to paint a watercolor sketch of the basic design
that Susie and I came up so she and Brian could get an idea of what was
going up. Then I set about refining the idea and gathering reference material,
which included taking pictures of the two models who would be Now, over three years later, the mural is still up and the sky has not turned green, so all is well. That was my biggest concern of the mural, that over time the smoke from thousands of cigars and hundreds of pipes would tint the sky and transform it from light blue to yellowish-green. But so far my scheme has worked perfectly. The colors I carefully mixed to use for the sky have held their luster while the color mixtures I used for the remainder of the mural have mellowed to the aging patina that I was hoping for—giving the mural the settled and old worldly appearance that predominates the rest of the shop and helps to make Telford’s such an enjoyable place to spend an afternoon savoring the flavors of fine tobacco—if you are, like me, a cigar and pipe smoker of course. However, even if you don’t smoke and you happen to be in the area
stop in and have a look in the member’s lounge at the mural and
say hello to Brian and Susie.
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immortalized
on the Telford’s wall sitting in the over-stuffed, soft leather,
cigar smelling arm chairs that are an integral part of the Telford’s
experience. Both models are friends and fellow cigar smokers, but both
took some convincing before they agreed to be photographed for the project.
Eventually, however, they agreed and I snapped pictures of Leslie Kopper
and Jeff Ross and finished the final design, laid it out on the wall,
and slung paint for a couple of months (stopping often to 
smoke
cigars) until the project was completed.
