Icons of Times Square are captured in color on the back wall of Roseland Ballroom. This project is the vision of urban artist Tom Christopher, who designed the upper portion of the 23 foot high wall canvas. Students created the lower six feet. The 225 foot long mural is on the back of Roseland Ballroom, on 53rd street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. Tom’s mural has been featured on the opening cerdits of the David Letterman show.
“Everything else around here has been done electronically, digitally and in glaring light,” said Tom Christopher, whose artwork can be viewed on the walls inside Rockefeller Center and Beverly Hills and who is coordinating this project. “our process is hundreds of years old, a first for Times Square.”
The mural is composed of nine panels, each more than 35 feet wide depicting pedestrians, bicyclists and other Time Square scenes stenciled on the wall with a process known as pouncing, dating for the Renaissance in which paper stencils and chalk are used to transfer the outlines of images.
Christopher is instructing students who will learn the process as apply it to their work on the lower six feet of wall.
Work on the mural took four weeks to complete. It was sponsored by the Times Square Business Improvement District. The gigantic piece of art was part of an urban rejuvenation which took place in the 1990’s
