Beth and Jesse Wilson call it “the Wall.”
The large vehicle just barely fit through their garage door at Thurston’s Plus Auto Body and More last October and it’s been a looming presence in the body shop since.
To Melissa Windsor and the Emporia Arts Council, it’s the Artmobile. And more importantly, it’s just about ready.
“We’ve been very anxious and excited to have it done,” said Windsor, the arts council’s director. “Once everyone sees it, they’ll know it was worth every bit of the wait.”
It certainly doesn’t look like a Frito-Lay truck anymore. The sides are now a wild array of color. Musical notes roll out from one direction and gigantic crayons poke out from another. Butterflies, puppets, even a shamrock or two have their place in the joyful chaos.
In other words, when the Artmobile joins the St. Patrick’s Day parade on March 17, it will make its debut in style. Very hard-earned style.
“Just the word ‘Artmobile’ ... to paint it was 14 hours,” Jesse Wilson said. “That’s two days of work!”
“But once you saw that, it was ‘We can do this!’” Beth Wilson said.
The Artmobile has been a dream of the arts council for about two years now, beginning with its previous director, Catherine Rickbone. The idea was to have a rolling classroom, something that could bring an arts class to any town in the seven-county area.
An $8,500 donation came from the St. Patrick’s Day Committee in 2005. An $18,360 donation from the Emil Babinger Charitable Trust eventually joined it. But the truck itself had a lot of work ahead. The transmission needed to be replaced, and the keys had been lost, meaning that it had to be towed into Emporia and then re-keyed.
The vehicle was drivable in time for the 2006 parade, but nowhere close to finished. Volunteers hastily taped signs thanking the St. Patrick’s Day Committee over the Frito-Lay emblems, with mixed success.
“Kids were yelling ‘Throw me some chips! Throw me some chips!’” Beth Wilson said with a laugh.
Once a design had been chosen, the first order of business was to clear the canvas. The emblems were etched off, then the truck was painted pure white. Then came the fun part.
Emporia State University student Dan Dishman created the design. Then Jason Brinkman, from the graphic design department at Flint Hills Technical College, had to grid the picture out and make it into a workable plan, something that would fit the dimensions of the truck.
“We wanted it to be fun, memorable,” Windsor said. “Something that, when you saw it, you would know it’s the EAC’s Artmobile.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Beth Wilson said, taking in the bursts of color and fancy decorations on the metal sides.
The first side took six to eight weeks to finish, Jesse Wilson said. As each new color was added, pieces of the truck had to be masked to protect the other layers. The other side, a bit less involved, took another four weeks, mostly through the efforts of one of the Wilsons’ workers, A.J. O’Dell.
“I basically let him have the other side and run with it,” Jesse Wilson said.
Emblems on the back side give thank to the vehicle’s donors.
There’s still some painting left to be done on the front. And before it goes into regular use, it needs air conditioning.
Still, the finish line is in sight.
“It ought to be just about ready by the end of next week,” Beth Wilson said on Friday. “We’ve got 19 days to finish from Sunday.”