Chicago artist Kathleen Dose-Koehl, who created the Homer Spit mural on the Pioneer Avenue Wildberry building, is back in Homer for the Alaska World Arts Festival and will paint another mural.
The new mural will be located on the wall of a privately owned building on Homer Spit Road, on the left, just after the stop sign. She is being assisted by locals RJ Nelson and Rich Feeny, who provided scaffolding.
The Homer Spit mural was one of Dose-Koehl’s first outdoor murals, although she has completed many others at indoor venues in other places in the country. Dose-Koehl says the use of outdoor paint should keep the murals in place for a relatively reasonable length of time.
At last year’s festival she taught a mural-painting workshop and this year she’s looking at how to recruit more people to come out and help paint.
“It’s challenging because it’s so weather dependent and you never know what the day is going to look like this time of year,” she said. If people are interested, they’re welcome to going visit the site and see how they might be able to help out.
The image for the new mural is of an alpenglow glacier scene chosen by festival director Sally Oberstein.
Dose-Koehl went to school in Northern Illinois for art illustration and has been working in private practice doing wall painting and murals since then.
Her daughter works for Graduate Hotels, a company that constructs hotels with themes based on the academic universities where they’re located. The company started in 2014 and there are currently 33 Graduate Hotel destinations. Dose-Koehl has provided murals the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, hotel and the UCONN hotel located in Storrs, Connecticut. Her next scheduled mural is in Northern Ireland at a facility with a golf property. The sizes are all variable. The one on the Homer Spit will be approximately 15 square feet.
Other art Dose-Koehl creates is personal and pet portraits, velvet portraits and chalk drawings. When she’s not working in mural design and creation, she works as a banquet server, though she’s relatively mobile and often traveling.
If community members are interested in contributing to the mural, all of the supplies will be available on-site. You can either visit the site directly if the weather is nice or contact Homer Art and Frame located on Lake Street or call them at 907-435-3999.
