WINNING MURAL FOR JACKSON CHOSEN

JACKSON -- When Grant Lund finished designing his entry for Jackson's first mural contest, he was worried he might have included a little too much.

The judges disagreed, and Lund's design was picked Thursday as the winning entry. General Sign Co. will begin transferring the design to the north wall of the Clabaugh Building in downtown Jackson next month, said Herb Wickham, who chaired the competition.

"There's so much you could include and how do you narrow it down?" asked Lund, a professor of art at Southeast Missouri State University, where he has taught for the last 25 years.

Lund's design features a large portrait of President Andrew Jackson, after whom the city is named, as well as a Homecomers banner, a blacksmith, the Cape Girardeau County Courthouse and old-time musicians.

"I particularly like Andrew Jackson," Lund said. "Although he was a controversial figure, he represented both the manifest destiny movement and he was right in the middle of things, involved with the people."

The Jackson mural is the first Lund has designed. He is probably best known for his printmaking and portraiture and for his work with the Drawing Group at the university.

On Monday, Lund will be presented with the $1,000 prize for his winning entry. The Arts Council of Southeast Missouri sponsored the contest.

Wickham said 19 entries were submitted, including one from a former Jackson resident now living in California.

"It was a tough decision," he said.

Judges had to consider several criteria, including historical content. It was important that the information included in the designs be accurate Wickham said.

While artistic merit was important, he said, judges also had to think about how the designs would look after being transferred to a large brick wall.

The judges narrowed the field to six finalists, and started "splitting hairs" from there, he said.

"There were a couple real good ones that would really be almost impossible to put on a brick wall because they were blended and so forth," Wickham said.

Some of the designs were too complex or too colorful, which meant they would be too expensive to transfer to the wall, he said.

Lund's entry is done mostly in shades of blue, a choice that sat well with the judges, Wickham said.

"Blue is the last color you see when the light fades," he said. "The first colors you lose are the reds and the oranges. With blue, since this thing will be on a north wall, it'll still be visible at twilight and in dim light."

The mural committee will remain active and other suitable walls just crying out for murals have been spotted around the city, Wickham said. Some of the entries that didn't win prizes could be chosen to decorate those walls, he said.

"We have six designs that we'd be happy to have on any wall around here," Wickham said.