A new mural commissioned by the city of Loveland is underway at the Loveland Recycling Center, with a twist—it’s being painted by the Loveland community. The design was set forward by Florida-based muralists Jhonattan and Samantha Arango, featuring a number of animals from land and sea that are affected by garbage in their environments, and hopefully addressed by the recycling that takes place at the center.
The framework of the mural, which incorporates geometric shapes that Jhonattan Arango said characterizes the couple’s style, is essentially an enormous paint-by-numbers project, with each shape bearing a letter, and each letter matching a color. Visitors to the site of all ages can simply claim a letter, grab a jar of the corresponding paint and fill in the shapes. “Anybody can do it, anybody,” Arango said. “From a 2-year-old to an 80-year-old, if you can hold a brush, you can do it. There’s something really beautiful about co-creating a mural, having something that everyone works together on. And historically speaking, with some of these older community murals, people remember exactly what triangle they painted. It’s sort of this mental real estate. You get to keep it.”
The original idea for the project came from public works staff, according to Loveland’s Public Arts Manager Suzanne Janssen, who was at the mural site on Saturday. Workers in an entry kiosk stare at a blank concrete barrier all day, and eventually asked about a mural that could fill the empty space.