By RICK MILLER
Olean Star
OLEAN — The perspective for “the Moment,” Olean’s latest public art on a brick wall at The Sports Locker on West State Street, is that of a young child looking up at a basketball player about to dunk the ball.
Mural artist Alex Derwick of Olean drew on his memories as a young boy at the Reilly Center watching the Bonnies in their heydays in the late 1990s in designing the mural commissioned by the Sports Locker.
On Sunday, a couple of dozen people stopped by the site to lend a hand and help paint by the numbers on Open Paint Day. The Tri-County Arts Council had put out an invitation earlier in the week inviting the public to pitch in and help paint the public mural.
This is Derwick’s second solo mural design effort in Olean, but he fell in love with the art form as a youth when Meg Saligman first painted the mural “Cherubs” on the side of a brick building on West State Street.
At age 9, he went with his mother, Paula Derwick of Fox Financial, to Philadelphia to participate in a public paint day on a mural Saligman was working on there called “Common Threads.” His mother and Saligman are longtime best friends.
Last year Derwick designed and organized the painting of the mural on the side of the William O. Smith Olean Recreation Facility at War Veterans Park. Before that, he participated in Saligman’s “Heart of Olean” mural at the Olean Campus of Jamestown Community College.
Derwick’s Mom, grandmother Sondra Fox and other family members including sisters Hannah and Liyah, formed the core of early painters on Sunday.
Soon, others began showing up, including parents with young children — some old enough to hold a paintbrush and some who were too young.
Derwick spent much of the past week preparing the surface of the wall by painting it white, then transferring the selected design onto the wall in a grid that includes numbers that match up with a certain color of paint.
“I’m excited Sports Locker commissioned me to do the mural,” Derwick said Sunday in an interview at the site with the Olean Star. The Tri-County Arts Council helped raise funds for the project.
“It’s taken a week to get this far,” Derwick said. “It should take another week to finish it up after today. The “kids perspective” was inspired by the Bonnies basketball games he attended as a child. He thinks younger people will identify with it.
“It’s moments in a game from a kids perspective,” he said. Besides the basketball image which dominates the left side of the mural, there are also images of “The Moment” in volleyball, soccer and baseball. “It’s meant to convey the feeling of being at sports games.”
Derwick especially likes the idea of inviting the public to participate in painting a mural. “People can say I was part of painting that mural. They can have some ownership in what was done.”
Derwick is an illustrator, animator and makes music videos. He’s also a co-director on a film he’s making with his fiance Van Tran Nguyen She was also busy working on the mural Sunday.
But when he’s out traveling around, Derwick’s always has his eyes open for that flat, blank wall that could be the “canvas” for his next mural.
