LIBERTY REMEMBERS

This cover story appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of PaintPRO Magazine. Unfortunately, this attractive trade pub was discontinued in 2008 or early 2009. I still do a lot of work for several other publications from the parent company, Professional Trade Publications.

David Searls

The blue-skied autumn morning began as many that year, with Eric Grohe up on a crane amidst brushes and paint cans, working away at a wall of an old brick building in Bucyrus, Ohio. The paint on his brushes and jeans came from Keim, an all-natural German brand valued for its outdoor durability.

Kathy Grohe interrupted her husband mid-morning with a strange bit of news she'd picked up, something about a plane having crashed into a building in New York City.

Grohe went back to work. Exterior muralists savor balmy weather like politicians before attentive, deep-pocketed crowds. It was much later that evening that the artist felt the full, awful impact of September 11, 2001. At that moment, his already epic project, Lady Liberty, achieved even deeper meaning for Grohe. Without even fully understanding what he was doing, he scribbled a hurried message on a large sheet of butcher paper and hoisted it high on his unfinished canvas.

“Her torch still shines, her flag still waves,” he'd written above the in-progress painting of Lady Liberty lifting a dying warrior to his eternal reward.

The next day, the flower bouquets began showing up at the base of the building.

Leap of Faith

Ask Deb Pinion, director of the Bucyrus Area Chamber of Commerce, where her little town is situated and she mention its proximity to Mansfield, a somewhat larger city in north-central Ohio, and home to a looming, shuttered prison that incarcerated Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman and other Hollywood types during filming of The Shawshank Redemption.

Bucyrus itself is a farm field-surrounded community of narrow Victorians and weathered frame homes. The downtown, like many in these Wal-Mart years, especially in hard-hit Ohio, needed...something. It looked somewhat forlorn with its derelict movie theater and empty storefronts amidst a liberally zoned accumulation of lawyers' and doctors' offices, real estate agencies, fast food joints, banks, auto parts dealers, chainr retailers and, nearby, the ornate courthouse and sky-high steeples of churches built during more prosperous times.

“We had a vacant lot on a town square, a gravel parking lot for the last twenty years,” Pinion recalls of the starting point of her envisioned revitalization. Bordering one end of that nook was an exterior wall of The Amish Vault Furniture Store. That's where she set her sights on a mural of the likes she'd seen in Steubenville, Ohio. They were created by Eric Grohe, found easily enough on the Internet.

Grohe and Kathy, his then-fiance, paid a visit and the result was 1999's American Crossroads, a truly epic view of nineteenth-century Bucyrus.

“It was entirely privately funded,” Pinion points out. As were the three Grohe murals that would follow, including Liberty Remembers.

“There are a lot of walls here,” she recalls Grohe saying while on his initial assignment.

He had his eye on the brick side of one particular building housing an Edward Jones investment branch and overlooking an ice cream stand. Nothing special, but the artist told Pinion, “I knew I was going to paint it when I left Vietnam. I just didn't know where I was going to put it.”

Now he had a place for his mind's image of Liberty Remembers.

Grohe is a gentleman, in the most literal sense, of about 60. Born in New York City, he served a tour of duty in Vietnam and eventually made Seattle his home—more or less. Most of his and Kathy's time is spent working on public projects that take up to a year to complete.

Though soft-spoken and friendly, the muralist knows when to put his foot down. One town wanted him to paint a bridge scene to honor the structure that marks its identify. Great idea, except that the project would be painted three blocks from the real deal. Why would he simply replicate the view?

“What I do isn't just a pretty picture slapped on a wall,” he explains. Some images “look good on a postcard, but don't create monuments.”

Grandeur in weather-resistant paint is what Grohe, with the help of his graphic artist wife and small teams of local art-school assistants, has created in communities throughout the U.S. And in South America and Malaysia. Communities like Bucyrus.

But while Grohe was eager to start Liberty Remembers, Pinion had only found partial funding by 2001. The artist started anyway in what Pinion calls “a leap of faith.”

They were in a “stage agreement,” and Grohe was in the second of four payment stages when 9/11 hit. The well ran dry while townspeople opened their wallets to the same sort of tragedy-related charities as did the rest of the nation.

Then a school-aged girl contributed ten dollars as a way of honoring her grandparents. After Pinion took the story to the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum, “the checks started pouring in.”

They Were Soldiers

Stepping back from the work one day, Grohe's critique of Liberty was that “it was nice, but it wasn't connecting with the people. It was a political message with national meaning, but no local significance.”

The solution, he decided, would be to add busts and a few full-body portraits of Crawford County's own warriors. Once Grohe had figured out room for 75 or 80 memorialized veterans, Pinion went back to the town's newspaper, this time soliciting photographs of area vets.

Afterwards, “I opened the door and went, 'Oh my God.' People had brought in bomber jackets, canteens, letters, photo albums...”

Trying to turn down as few loved ones as possible, Grohe found space for 284 soldiers up and down and alongside the vertical pillars. He painted veterans of the Civil War, Spanish-American War, both world conflicts, Vietnam, Desert Storm—even the RevolutionaryWar. The bluecoat had, of course, served long before the invention of the camera, but his image was captured at the age of 103.

Kathy scanned and printed each photo to a height of about eight inches. Then, using a pontillist technique, Grohe outlined facial features by poking holes into a fine mesh fabric. Through the fabric he poured powdered chalk, leaving a blue outline on the wall. With this as a guide, he painted about a dozen portraits a day.

Grohe can be unapologetically sentimental. Among the 284 Liberty faces is one young Vietnam casualty extending a Purple Heart. It's for his mother, who never received his medal through a falling out between widow and immediate family. There's also Nemo, a famous Vietnam War canine courier who completed a final mission despite losing an eye to gunfire. Nemo's handler lives in the area and submitted the photo with the comment that the dog had “saved more men than I did.” Careful viewers will also spot a horseshoe in recognition of the memorably courageous mount of a local Revolutionary War general. (“After having to turn down so many soldier photographs, I couldn't justify painting an actual horse,” Grohe explains.)

The community introduced itself as though for the first time through Liberty. “There were submarine soldiers living next door to one another who didn't know it,” Grohe recalls.

As Pinion proudly states after mentioning inclusion of an area boy who was the last Marine killed at Iwo Jima, “We were patriotic before patriotic was cool.”

Thanks to Eric Grohe, that fact will be apparent to generations of residents and visitors to Bucyrus, Ohio.