10-foot rose blooms on 30th Street

Southern California’s sun can bleach hair, furrow faces, and beat the colors off public art.

San Diego artist Maxx Moses commissioned a series of panels a year and a half ago for the Alliance San Diego building at 3750 30th Street. He recently noticed that the art on one of the community center’s panels had dulled.

“The wheat paste up there on one of the panels looked a little raggedy,” he said.

Though Moses commissioned the work, it was the artists — Monty Montgomery and JFeather, who collaborate under the name Kreashun — who took the initiative to alter the murals by adding color, detail, new designs, and fresh paint.

“We worked about 25 hours, adding pattern work, checkerboard designs, and including black lines and color,” Montgomery said upon completing the mural last month. JFeather also rendered a ten-tall-foot rose rising from the cityscape.

Kreashun has exhibited at the THREAD show in San Diego and completed other murals in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas.

The original mural was cut by a series of lines — a small urban scape and beam-like rays shot with bright pastels. But the space lacked the busy human diversity of the other panels and the wheat paste had dulled. Feather centered the restored mural on a symbol, the stretched rose, by stenciling the shape of the vast bowl-like bloom before spray-painting its deep vermillion petals.

The reinvigorated colors appear ready for the sun.

The restored mural is among others created by eight California artists, including Miguel Godoy of San Diego. Work on the center walls was completed in October 2012.