Daily Loaf

Bruce Marsh, Riverwall (detail). Photo by Megan Voeller.

Downtown Tampa’s Riverwalk gained a public art cornerstone recently with the installation of Bruce Marsh’s Riverwall– a 40-foot long mural composed of photographic images of the Hillsborough River. Fired into porcelain enamel on steel plates, the images show the river– a 54-mile long waterway integral to the region’s ecological health– in a variety of incarnations, from a forking artery seen from above to a forested stomping ground for boaters.

Marsh, who taught art at the University of South Florida from 1969 to 2003, is well known in the region and beyond as an outstanding landscape painter. Though the Riverwall relies mainly on photographic depictions of the river, some of his paintings appear as pictures among the 550 featured images (each 8-inches by 9-1/2-inches). From afar, the grid forms a purposely enigmatic, river-like shape based on a photograph of floating water lilies.

“The whole idea [was to make] something that would offer a visual hook… that would entice and draw people… and function as a gathering point,” Marsh says.

For the artist, seeing the mural in place marks the end of a long and sometimes arduous project. In posts at brucemarsh.wordpress.com, he describes the trial-and-error process necessitated by experimenting with a new medium– the porcelain enamel, which involved “screening mineral pigments in a matrix of glass and then firing [each] plate to 1800 degrees” seven times– and collaborating with the project’s Seattle-based fabricator.

Marsh, who began blogging in May, also describes the challenge of preparing photographs digitally for inclusion in the mural. (For example, to achieve a pleasing checkerboard or ‘quilt’ effect in the grid, he sometimes found himself deliberately over and underexposing images– sacrificing a bit of quality in an individual picture for overall impact in the mural.) In the end, he hopes to have achieved the holy grail of artists who work in the public realm: to make something “of some interest to the public that at the same time can function as serious art.”

“That’s really difficult,” Marsh says.

Situated at the southwest corner of Channelside Drive and Meridian Avenue, the mural serves as an gateway to the Riverwalk at the Tampa Bay History Center (directly adjacent to the St. Pete Times Forum parking lot).

Megan Voeller is Creative Loafing’s visual art critic. She teaches at the University of Tampa and blogs at Artsqueeze.com.

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