Historical Mural Restoration
Last night I completed a historical mural restoration at the Bank of America branch located on Wisconsin Avenue, in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC.
In speaking with the branch manager and another employee there, I found out that this mural is at least 100 years old! However, no one there seemed to know the exact date of it, or who painted it. I couldn’t find an artist signature anywhere on the mural.
The mural is located along a wall behind where the tellers are located. It looks like a nautical scene along the Potomac River. A few years ago, the bank was going to replace the mural with some standard advertising of bank products, but so many long-time customers complained to the bank about keeping the mural rather than replace it with advertising, and the bank actually listened! Hooray for that.
The restoration work involved applying more spackle to the patch of wall that had been repaired, in order to bring the repaired area level with the mural surface. From there, I was able to paint over the spackle and very closely match the original mural painting.
Here are before and after photos:
Before:
After:
And here is a photo of more of the original mural:
I have to say, even though we had secure access to the bank, being in a bank after-hours is still a bit unnerving. I was accompanied by a guy from the commercial construction company (Meckley Services) that contracted this work out to me, so we got to hang out and tell stories the whole time, which made it more entertaining than it would have otherwise been!