SPRING IN JAPAN
Second Hanamaki mural painted downtown
Downtown Hot Springs has gained a new mural that is a companion piece to one painted in 2018, both depicting Hot Springs’ Sister City of Hanamaki, Japan.
The murals were created by Giuseppe Percivati, better known as Pepe Gaka. His original mural shows Hanamaki during a snowy winter and the second one, located next to the first, depicts Hanamaki during spring.
While winter is synonymous with snow, Gaka said spring in Japan is known for cherry blossom trees. “It sort of has to be about cherry blossoms,” he said.
The mural shows the trees in bloom in front of a temple, with two people walking around. Gaka said he was already planning to paint a temple and was inspired further by some photos that Mary Zunick, executive director of the Hot Springs Sister City Program, had taken in Japan.
Seeing a photo she took of a temple, Gaka decided to recreate it for the mural.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” Zunick said
of the new mural, noting it “just captures so perfectly the feeling at Hanamaki in spring.”
Gaka said the idea to continue adding seasons to go with the original mural was talked about from the start. Now that he has done two seasons, he said he will have to come back in the future and paint summer and fall, noting, “The next one will be next year.”
Zunick said the mural was originally intended to be painted during the Arts & the Park festival, a multiday celebration of the arts. Gaka arrived in Hot Springs in early March to begin planning it, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and he found himself stuck in Arkansas.
Arts & the Park was delayed to later this year.
“I’ve actually been here for three months,” Gaka said. “In a good way, I was stuck in Hot Springs.” Gaka is Italian, and he said the international borders closed, preventing him from going home.
Being unable to leave, Gaka said, allowed him to paint more. “I had so many things to catch up on,” he said, adding he had “no excuse whatsoever not to do” the work he had been putting off.
“I was very happy to spend three months here,” he said.
The spring Hanamaki mural isn’t the only one he has painted while stranded in Hot Springs. He also painted a small mural on the side of The Rooftop Bar at The Waters Hotel.
Zunick’s husband, Robert, is one of the partners at the hotel. When The Rooftop Bar was opened recently, Mary Zunick said the place “needed a little something.”
The mural, located on top of a tall building, depicts several recognizable Hot Springs figures floating in clouds, including Monte Everhart and Dick Antoine as leprechauns, musicians Clif Coleman and Reggie
Cravens, a horse race and the police department racing the fire department in the Stueart Pennington World Championship Running of the Tubs.
Zunick said the late Coleman “was a dear friend” and he “was the first musician to ever play on the rooftop.” She said it “seemed appropriate” for him to be on the wall of the building.
“It’s great,” Zunick said about the mural at the bar.
With borders now open again, Gaka said he would return to Italy where he intends to spend time with his nephews, sister and father and take a break from work until either August or September.
The mural, located on the wall of Core Public House, was sponsored by the Hot Springs National Park Sister City Foundation, which is the nonprofit part of the Sister City program.
Zunick noted that “no taxpayer money (was) spent on this project.”