Alaska News

Murals brush Anchorage with heartfelt thank-yous

Military people tend not to stay in one place for long. The only thing for certain is the uncertainty of where they'll end up next.

When Sharon Smith and her family leave the state this summer for parts as yet unknown, she'll be leaving a lot of herself behind. All over walls. All over ceilings, hallways and stairwells.

That's because white walls make her yawn. So wherever she lives she leaves murals in her wake. Murals in church nurseries, in pediatrics clinics, in community gathering halls. A mural in a mortuary even.

Smith paints for hire. But the ones that mean the most to her she paints for free. She thinks of them as gifts to the communities she's been part of, her latest being Anchorage, where she and her Air Force husband and their growing family have lived for four years.

Her most recent volunteer job is on the walls of the newly expanded oncology clinic at the Alaska Native Medical Center.

Smith's murals are often whimsical: Medieval frogs in shining armor. Polar bears doing cannonballs off ice floes.

This project was different. This project she prayed for.

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"I wanted to do something that would make a difference," she said, "not just some froufie thing on the wall."

She was telling this to her friend, Brett Brown. "Funny you should say that," said Brown, who works as clinical project administrator at ANMC.

Turns out, the Native hospital was remodeling its cancer clinic. Brown thought Smith's murals would be a great way to bring life into the place.

The clinic is a pretty cozy operation of eight infusion chairs. With no windows, it's the murals' job to bring the outside in.

In one corner, Smith painted Denali framed in fireweed and birch bark. In another, a coastal mountain scene with a smorgasbord of edible plants, from berries to fiddlehead ferns. In a third, spotted seals swimming about in a stylized sea -- four big ones to represent her four children, and a tiny one in honor of the one coming in September.

The idea, Brown says, is to inspire cancer patients to think of things far more pleasant than the reason they're in that room. And it appears to be working. Like the patient from Barrow who went straight for the chair by the seals. He said they reminded him of home.

BACON IN THE SUN

You'd think a woman with four children under the age of seven and another in the oven wouldn't have time for painting her nails let alone murals up to three-stories high. She makes time. And sometimes she just brings along the kids.

Her first big public job was in a church nursery in Montana, where she painted the disembarking of Noah's Ark. Working off and on, that one took her two months.

"I had a newborn and a 15-month-old and they were with me on site," she said. "So I had to take a lot of breaks. Change diapers, breast-feed ..."

In the beginning, 20-some years ago, Smith projected her sketches onto the walls she painted. But she hasn't done that in years. She goes pretty much free form now.

"Now I just look at a wall and say, 'Hmmm.' "

Several of her murals are at Elmendorf Air Force Base, where her active-duty husband, Brian, is a physical therapist.

For the Armed Forces YMCA, she did a 28-foot-long mural called "Bacon in the Sun," with pigs sunbathing on a beach.

She put in 280 hours turning the walls of the base's Hillberg Ski Area lodge into a Swiss village, a scene that includes the Matterhorn rising up a 38-foot wall and 1,500 hand-painted stairs along a stairwell.

Smith likes to hide things in the murals that have meaning for her, like those spotted seals that represent her kids. Within the ski lodge mural, she hid 18 corn dogs.

Some friends on a kayaking trip chowed down an entire box of 18 corn dogs around a campfire one night, inspiring her hidden tribute to their "disgusting" feat.

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Dr. Laura Peterson knows Smith's murals from Elmendorf. She likes them so much that when she left the Air Force and opened Ptarmigan Pediatrics in Wasilla, she hired Smith, giving her free reign over the waiting area, the hallway and the exam rooms.

The restroom, too, where Smith painted ptarmigan caricatures stacked three high in a twist on the three wise monkeys: Hear no evil, see no evil, smell no evil, with that wise ptarmigan pinching its nose.

The three murals at the Native hospital's oncology center make 18 Smith will be leaving behind in Alaska.

"This one was my most rewarding, most emotional experience," she said. "This made more of an impact on my heart, doing it from my heart."

At the clinic's reopening reception, the hospital administration had a surprise for her. Since she'd given the place a gift, it gave her one: A shadowbox with a stylized ulu made of whale baleen and caribou antler by Isaac Attungana, and a little skin kayak by Dennis Swan.

"Thank you for your generous contribution making the oncology clinic a more welcoming place for Alaska Native patients, families and staff," read the inscription.

"I cried buckets," Smith said.

And then she told her husband it was time to move his 28-inch rainbow trout from above the fireplace, because that's where this shadowbox is going.

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Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney.

By DEBRA McKINNEY

dmckinney@adn.com

Debra McKinney

Debra McKinney is an Alaska writer and former longtime feature writer for the Anchorage Daily News.

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