Out of sight: Hurley’s newest mural is ambitious and well hidden




















BELFAST - It's hard to imagine David Hurley being intimidated by a request to paint a mural.
In downtown Belfast, his depictions of cats poised in windowsills and doorways are seemingly everywhere. Outside Alexia’s Pizza, Hurley painted owner Ted Rakis sharing a slice of pizza with an alien. Inside the restaurant, he completed another artist’s unfinished a mural of Spartan soldier by turning his upraised shield into a pizza being pummeled by a meteor shower of toppings, while tourists linger by the Acropolis in the background.
After years of imagining the rear corner of a strip mall behind the post office as the prow of a ship, he got the owner’s permission to paint a porthole, an anchor and a spray of waves on it. He rechristened it the S.S. Belfast.
But when he was asked to paint a scene on an interior wall of a hangar at Belfast Municipal Airport last winter, he confessed some anxiety.
The requirements of the owner, Michael Sobota, were fairly loose. “He wanted seven planes and two helicopters,” Hurley said. “My job was to make it interesting to look at.”
What worried Hurley was the proposed size: 23-feet wide and 13-feet high, starting five feet above the floor. Aside from the S.S. Belfast, which he put in a different category, the dozens of murals he had painted over the years had always been much smaller.
Over a period of seven months, Hurley and a fellow painter Russell Kahn would log 450 hours inside the hangar. The mural was done in four phases, each comprising a complete section of the painting. Along the way, Hurley said he was constantly second guessing himself. Each session felt like “another day to screw it up,” he said.
He waited for complaints about his invoices. He waited for Sobota to pull the plug on the project. But Hurley said his patron always seemed excited by the progress on the mural.
After a certain amount of this, Hurley had a revelation. He was getting paid to do something he loved.
“How many people have had the opportunity to stand on a scaffold and ...” He stopped mid-sentence and painted a few brushstrokes in the air. “And have a patron?” he said.
“It seemed so different from what I’ve done, but when you hear about people who get commissions, it’s like, it’s there. People have money.”
Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com
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