My piece is on a historic building – The Warwick Hotel. The building is currently used for low income housing. It’s an old building with a lot of rich history. I’m painting on a blank patch of the building which is a repair from the damage of a large fire which destroyed a wing in the ’60s. The building was a newspaper office, radio station, mayor’s office, post office, bank, barber shop and even served as a secret offloading place during prohibition. I put together a piece that considered a lot of these elements.

The focus of the mural is a reporter who listens to “the city” and jots down notes. He is framed by an architectural detail of Tudor Rose roundels. The Tudor Rose is taken directly from the ceiling design of the hotel. The mural also includes elements from the hotel’s history – an antique mailbox (post office’s past), an antique safe (bank), a ship (the prohibition drop-off, as well as the nautical history of Newport News), and an antique barber’s chair (from the newspaper clippings in the lobby). 

The model for the reporter is symbolic, chosen to reflect the community that sits with the mural daily. As I have been painting him, the residents (there is a group of about 10-15 folks that sit out every day and watch) have taken to calling him Mr. Warwick. On his hat is the symbolic “press ticket”. On his lapel is a swan brooch, which is a nod to the Warwick name (and family crest). The family crest is found everywhere in the architecture of the building, specifically within the wooden decorative trim in the lobby, as well as in the historical documentation in the lobby display. On the pencil he is using, I have included the old call letters for the radio station that was housed in the building, which was another form of relaying information and truth to the residents of the city.

I was thinking about the Warwick’s family motto, which would have been included in print versions of the crest in the lobby – “Vic ea Nostra Voco” (I seldom call these things mine own) – which is really about the importance of community, of listening to the community and responding. This has ties to the journalistic tradition as well as the role of the artist – which is, at its heart, a responsibility to the public to relay the truth. Essentially this piece is encouraging listening to the city while acknowledging its past.