Trippy mural design takes shape on Linfield campus

Kirby Neumann-Rea/News-Register##Linfield student Bailee Romine adds fine detail to the “mushroom lady” element on the mural “Roots of the Heart” at the Miller Art Center. Romine considers the mural a visual “trip” open to interpretation.

Kirby Neumann-Rea/News-Register##Koi, jellyfish, hares, eyes, mushrooms and mystical feminine figures surround the dominant heart image on the new Linfield mural.

The community’s newest outdoor artwork seems to deal a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” hand but goes deeper than that.

“Roots of the Heart,” is the title of the changeable mural on the Linfield University campus, visible at the southwest corner of the campus, just off Keck Drive at the corner of the James F. Miller Art Center building.

The 15-year tradition for Totem Shriver’s Introduction to Studio class challenges students — some art majors, some not — to combine creative efforts for a cohesive mural. Each year, sometimes twice in a year, the mural is painted over and a new one takes its place. The students use latex house paint, which dries fast yet is weather-proof.

The wall is a non-permanent canvas, yet despite 15 years of paintings it has no official name. “We just call it Keck Drive mural,” Shriver said. The new mural went up in twice-weekly sessions the last three weeks of October. The 2023-24 mural was kept up all year because of other projects. Shriver said, “It depends on the combination of students,” who do a variety of one-, two- and three-dimensional projects. (Similar panels were installed at the entry to the Miller Center, replacing boards so deteriorated that students were no longer able to apply paint.)

Adding details to a phantasmagoric mushroom, Kyla Kross said, “I’m not one who’s very creative, but I’m having a good time.” Kross is a business major from Bonney Lake, Wash.

Several other mushrooms can be seen on the mural and on another Shriver-led mural, the one painted in 2021 on the recreation building across campus at Cowls and College streets.

This year on the Keck mural a Lewis Carroll-like Queen of Hearts makes an appearance and pair of hares — not rabbits — who are inverted, akin to a playing card. Thick vines seem to come up from the earth and wrap around a large heart that dominates the center, flanked by mostly feminine figures in a combination of abstract and representational elements.

“Surreal, if I had to put a word to it,” Shriver said. “When we started it was the idea of ‘psychedelic,’ and what does that mean? I realized after a week or to that my idea and others ideas are different things. I’m only aware of mine,” Shriver said.

Another inverted feature is the double image of what Shriver calls “Yin-Yang Koi.” He said several elements are upside down and “in the middle is the heart, the gateway into the drug of the mural. It’s the first thing you see.” He described as “powerful” the peacock woman that was a major component that took longer to complete.

Bailee Romine, a Salem freshman majoring in nursing, painted a fungus hat on a “mushroom lady,” and said, “It is doing exactly what we were hoping it would do, which is kind of overwhelm the mind in a way, be a sort of trip.

“You can create your own little story with it. Whoever’s looking at it can think about whatever they want,” Romine said.

Shriver guides the class but some students guide their peers in each rendition of the mural.

“There are a lot of levels including some people who have never painted something in their adult life and others are art students who are comfortable with the work. They’re all working together,” Shriver said.

“It’s almost like you’re looking at an illusion, in a way,” Kross said. “That’s what we wanted to create when we started out ... We didn’t know how it was going to turn out. Totem was also worried it wouldn’t come together, but given a chance … there is a lot of movement but also a lot of layering in the background, and the shadows and forms in the front. I think it’s everyone’s creative mind coming together as one.

“It’s hectic, chaotic, lots of patterns,” she said.