Durum in the Alley

By Millie Hanson
Visual Arts Editor

“Being an artist is 90% business,10% art,” Paul Ide declared the other day. He was working on his newest mural that shows a big blue North Dakota sky with a few little fluffy clouds and stylized ripened wheat. Paul is a muralist and practitioner of societally acceptable, aka legal, graffiti.

No aspiring artist, fresh out of school, really wants to hear that 90% of their time should be spent on something other than making art. Earning a degree or simply practicing their passion on a daily basis seems like it should be enough. Right?

“I didn’t want to believe it because I was starstruck.”

Like most young artists, he thought that the advice he was getting didn’t apply to him and it used to frustrate him. “I can just do it. You’re an old fuddy duddy, what do you know,” he said, speaking about those who had learned the hard way. Now, years down the road, when he sees those same people, he goes up and shakes their hand.

He talked about dealing with struggles as a young practicing artist, failing to learn lessons the first time around, and how he should have listened to the practical advice he got before starting out on his own to try and make money at his craft. He did admit that like most artists, “I’m stubborn.”

Instead of making his home elsewhere in a larger city with a more established art scene after graduation, he and his artistic peers from MSUM decided to stick around instead. “Let’s build a cooperative art studio and have a gallery, somewhere that will show college students’ work before they graduate,” he said. The space is called the Robert Street Studio, near the corner of 7th Avenue North on Roberts Street and a couple buildings south of The Empire.

There are benefits to these new artists by being around at the beginning of a newly emerging art scene. One of them is access to experienced practicing artists like those who are part of the FMVA.

The F-M community is gaining a big head of steam by building on the previous hard work by these older, more experienced artists who have pioneered here. The Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA) have been around for a number of years and its member list is the Who’s Who of area artists. The FMVA is paving the way for a new crop of artists to practice their craft for an already established and still growing audience. Paul Ide, after figuring out how to make a living doing only what he loves, is one of them.

For his North Dakota mural, he approached the Kilbourne Group, a downtown development business who owns the wall. His client signed on to his proposed mural after seeing the detailed sketch of a head of ripe wheat along with the sketch for the entire mural.

He made it easy for them to imagine what the completed mural would look like and also why they should give permission for the project. Art Materials agreed to donate the paint in hopes that other artists would come inside to find out who painted the mural, then buy their paint and art supplies. Paul got to leave his mark with his art and add a piece to his working resume, showing that he’s done work for a commercial client in a very public way.

While the mural was being painted, mistakes and crossouts and things to be corrected were obvious, but the finished piece is without flaw. It was a reminder to any artist who saw the piece in progress that yes, mistakes are part of creation, but they are not insurmountable obstacles. As an artist seeing someone else’s work, sometimes it’s easy to forget that.

Paul Ide’s other mural projects include one that he’s finishing up inside Wild Knights CrossFit on South University, one that’s in the works in Park City, Utah, and another mural he’s finishing up in his hometown of Loveland, CO. Others include a warm weather break during winter to complete a mural in Ft. Worth, TX, and a future mural that will be inside a doctor’s house in Bismarck.

This last project shows a very smart way for a less-than-independently-wealthy artist to accomplish multiple goals: Paul is getting paid for traveling to Bismarck and this lets him get more of his tattoos worked on for no additional travel cost. Maybe the best thing about all this is him getting his art seen in the home of a doctor whose guests will see it. Who knows what kind of projects he’ll land because of this?

His next mural will be painting alongside some of the Midwest’s best street artists: STUN, EACH2, TOIL and JAPL. They will create a collaborative aerosol art mural on the Arctic Audio building at 14 8th St South in downtown Fargo. Mural art creation goes from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, July 15 through Sunday the 17 (weather permitting), with plenty of hip-hop artists and DJ’s from around the region joining in to liven up the action. (Also on Friday at 6 p.m., DJ Stupid Birthday is giving a lecture on the evolution of the scratch DJ.)

JAWSH and AWON, two aerosol artists who were part of the Hip Hop Don’t Stop mural projects the last two summers, created the Peacock mural outside of Mackenzie Kouba’s space at 525 Roberts.

To see the progress on Paul’s mural visit the High Plains Reader Facebook page to find the link or watch a timelapsed video here: http://tiny.cc/Mural

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What: Indoor & Outdoor Murals by Paul Ide
When: Now
Where: ND wheat field: alley wall behind Art Materials (300 Broadway),
Peacock mural (Mackenzie Kouba’s space) north of 4th St. North on the east side of the street, and Wild Knights CrossFit at 3343 South University (limited hours, so please check out their website: http://www.wildknightscrossfit.com.
Cost: None, just transportation expenses to go see them.