In Redlands, the marble-clad former Home Savings is getting an overhaul for a new use as a restaurant and bar with an outdoor patio. But the exterior mural paying homage to old Redlands will remain.
And this week, that mural, which was overseen by the famed Millard Sheets, is getting some tender loving care.
Brian Worley, a mosaic artist, is doing the work. And who better? Worley, 73, was among the artists in the Sheets Studio who created the mural some four decades ago.
“This is full circle for me,” Worley told me Tuesday morning, sweating under a straw hat, as he took a break in the building’s shade. “It’s really another moment of connecting me back to the studio.”
Sheets, who was born in Pomona in 1907 and died in 1989, was a painter, muralist and architectural designer who worked from a studio in Claremont.
I’d interviewed Worley earlier in August as the Claremont man restored another Sheets mural, one bound for the Hilbert Museum in Orange. But it was important to me to visit him as he repaired the Redlands mural, the subject of a column back in May.
The 1980 mural is on a prominent corner and of fair interest to the community. And with a restaurant, Finney’s Crafthouse, coming in, more people will notice the mural than have seen it in years.
It’s a triptych of images that include women in Victorian dress first and in 1920s garb at the end, with a citrus picker and child in the center piece. Background structures are the 1890 Morey Mansion, the 1898 A.K. Smiley Public Library and the 1927 Memorial Chapel at the University of Redlands.
Sheets’ roughly 150 murals for Home Savings typically were rooted in the local community and reflected its history.
The Redlands murals begin about 12 feet from the ground. Worley climbed a ladder to a temporary platform from which he worked. Due to the heat wave, he got started at 7 a.m. and finished at 10:15 a.m., when it was already in the 90s.
He foresaw three mornings of labor. Tuesday he cleaned the mural, placed blue tape around areas to which he will apply stain, chipped out some fractured tile and assessed what needs to be done.
Wednesday he’ll install missing tile. Thursday he’ll apply stain, grout and a final seal. That ought to keep the mural looking good for years to come.
In fact, for a piece that’s more than 40 years old, it was in remarkably good shape. “Not even half of 1%” of the tiles were damaged, Worley said. “There wasn’t even that much dirt. I’m using white rags and they’re not all that dirty.”
More proof Redlands is special. Even dirt knows better than to stick around.
Still, the mural has hairline cracks, which is what caused tile to fracture. Each piece is Italian glass and about a half-inch in size.
How many tiles make up this mural? “I would say tens of thousands,” Worley said.
He took a few photographs of damaged areas to help him match the colors from his collection of tile. I asked what he’d noticed in being so close to the art.
“The treatment of the pants the fruit pickers wore,” Worley said. In the studio’s earlier days, they’d have outlined the pants in black, as you would in a line drawing. In this later mural, the colors do the work.
Sue Hertel should rightly be credited with the mural. While Sheets did some conceptual work on it, according to researcher Adam Arenson, Hertel was the lead artist and signed the piece in tile, Worley said.
Jude Freeman, Katie Boesen and Worley himself were the other artists directly involved, Arenson said. Worley hadn’t been sure if he’d worked on it or not, but said, “It looks really familiar.”
About 150 Home Savings branches were established from the 1950s to the 1980s. Some are now Chase Bank. That was the case in Redlands until Chase left in 2017. The building has sat largely vacant other than a Century 21 office and an escrow office, both upstairs.
As these buildings have changed hands, commitment to the exterior and interior murals, sculptures and stained glass windows has varied depending on the vigilance of the community and the strength of local preservation laws, if any.
“If the building has been shuttered a while, people forget what’s inside. The art can easily be painted over or removed, or the building could be demolished without anyone thinking about it,” Worley said. “It all depends on the community.”
Redlands, thankfully, came down on the right side.
More murals
My Aug. 20 column was about how Worley was restoring a 41-foot Sheets mural from Santa Monica that had been in storage. He was doing so inside a former Claremont High building, now part of a commercial complex, because of the expanse of floor space.
Some of you cheered him on as far as keeping Sheets’ legacy alive.
“So glad the mural is being saved and restored,” said Linda Takeuchi of Chino. “Too many of his murals are gone.”
“Brian and I worked together for a number of years at University of La Verne,” said Steve Morgan, a ULV president emeritus. “He is a multi-talented artist and did a wonderful job as he beautified a neglected campus.”
I was walking on campus Monday morning and once again admired Worley’s citrus-themed mural on an exterior wall of Citrus Residence Hall.
Back to Claremont. I misidentified the building in which Worley was working as the high school’s old theater. Easy enough to do, since it was used by Candlelight Pavilion for dinner theater from 1985 to its closing in 2022. But no, it was actually the high school gymnasium, readers Dick Holtz and Tammy Woodman alerted me.
“The Quonset hut was originally a gym when I was there, class of 1949,” the ageless Woodman told me. “Whenever I went to a show at the Candlelight Pavilion, I thought, ‘I’m in my old gym.’”
Noting that a high-end health club is the reported next use, she added: “If it’s going to go back to being a gym, well, that’s kind of appropriate.”
David Allen sweats over these columns Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
