El Cerrito Homes, completed March 2021
Two murals each 8 x 28 ft, hand cut and custom glazed porcelain mosaic mural, fabrication 2017 - 2021
These two porcelain mosaic artworks were created for the new expansion of El Cerrito Del Norte BART Station artwork. The murals have two main inspirations for its design. First is the natural landscape and views from El Cerrito, the spectacular bay views from the hills and the landscape of El Cerrito Hills. The second inspiration is the city of El Cerrito as the “City of Homes.”
With the landscapes as backgrounds, I made cut out collages based on photographs of homes in El Cerrito. The “Hillside Artwork” to be placed on the east-side wall (hill side) shows the artist’s pastel landscape drawing of the El Cerrito hills connecting to Berkeley Hills as the base of the composition. Overlaid on top of the landscape is a complex line drawing traced from a satellite street map of the area. The lines represent city streets, parks and Interstate 80. The cut out shapes of the houses are tracings of actual houses from El Cerrito’s past and present. Historical buildings are on the top left and are represented as black and white shapes. Other shapes in the front are houses from the streets surrounding Del Norte BART station such as Cutting Blvd, Lexington Street, Elm Street, Kearney Street etc. Examples of homes from El Cerrito’s history represented in the artwork are the Castro abode and Chung Mei home.
The “Bayside Artwork” is created with the base of a pastel drawing of the San Francisco bay view based on a collage of artist’s photographs from the El Cerrito Hills overlaid with line drawings tracing of the landscape and architecture. The larger three graphic elements show the idea of home of the past and present through a bold line drawing of a contemporary home (created from a current El Cerrito home), a bird’s nest perched on a branch of an oak tree (a native tree), and a line drawing of a typical Ohlone hut. With these elements, I am introducing the idea of home in the past, present and future time continuum. The bird’s nest represent the distant past of abundant nature in the area, the current state of controlled and minimized nature, and the future of more green and preserved nature.