The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
New mural appears at Sammich deli
Public art project approved by Review Board
People heading north on E. 185th St. aren’t likely to miss the uninspired, sterile white paint that covered the side of, now, Jack Flaps Sammich deli at the corner of Abby Avenue.
They may, however, take a moment to ponder what exactly adorns the 10-foot tall by 50-foot wide exterior wall, but thanks to the city of Euclid, and the deli shop’s owner, Randy Carter, citizens will no longer see a wall the color of a padded cell.
“The building itself is old,” said Carter, who opened in early May. “I have no problem with having it brightened up. I met a lot of the city officials during our grand opening and they asked me about the space and having it used for an art project.
“It’s a big canvas, so I said, ‘Of course.’ We were all in agreeance. It’s going to be nice pulling in the lot and having something to look at.”
The public art project received approval from Euclid’s Architectural Review Board June 22. In addition to Carter, the city connected with Cleveland artist Bob Peck to design and paint the mural. Peck, with his project assistant, Roy Reid, completed the new mural on July 1.
The mural draws on the vibrancy of other murals on the street and in the neighboring Waterloo Arts District, where Peck’s work also can be seen. The mural also jump-starts the implementation of the Euclid’s master planning process, according to a city news release.
Begun last summer and set to wrap up this summer, one of the priorities stemming from the Euclid Master Plan is the community’s desire to see public art enliven East 185th Street. This was also a notable goal in the corridor’s TLCI (Transportation for Livable Communities Initiative) planning study adopted by Euclid City Council in 2016, the release stated.
Peck said the collaboration sought to work in other areas which didn’t pan out.
“In the end, this is great, I couldn’t ask for a better canvas to work on. The visibility is great. Allison (LukacsyLove, community projects manager with Euclid’s Department of Planning and
Development) worked real hard to get me this spot. Randy was all for it, too. He told me he knew my work and that this was my wall.
“I do a lot of public art pieces and gallery shows, but every now and then I like to go bigger, I like to paint large,” Peck said. “I like getting art out for people to brighten up the area. I used to do a lot of graffiti back in the ’90s; I was fascinated by it, fell in love with it and fell into abstract in the early 2000s. This is sort of like an abstract in graffiti, that’s what I tell everybody.”
Typically, Peck doesn’t come up with a particular conception on the front end —“I just start blasting out shapes”— but after he was approached by Euclid, he digitally drew up his design in Photoshop and treated the space that day.
“I like to do asymmetrical work, just pick a heavy spot, start whipping out shapes and have everything swirl out,” he said. “We went right on top of the white, too, with a mix of spray paint and latex paint. This is what came to be.
“It’s really cool because a lot of my work ends up on the West Side, so it’s nice to have something here out East. Ally found me and Euclid’s
Architectural Review Board was really great about the whole process. I’d never been in that type of situation, going in front of a board, so I didn’t know what to expect. In fact, they asked me to take up as much space as I could, to go big with it. I knew I could definitely do that.”
Peck believes “street art” has come a long way since his early days when a lot of artistic expression, primarily that used with spray paint, was generally dismissed and categorized as vandalism.
“We now have artists doing million dollar shows,” he said, adding that Cleveland and Northeast Ohio continue to remain open to artists’ work. “This region is very accepting of a variety of works from creatives. It’s a lot harder in other cities going through the red tape. Here, they embrace things that make the city more bright and colorful.
“Honestly, when I was a teenager and I was sneaking out at night to paint, if you’d have told me a city’s architectural review board would be asking me to paint a wall, 20 years later, I’d have never believed you. Things like this used to be a hard sell, but now it’s being taken for what it is. It’s an amazing thing.”