As mural rises in downtown Riverside, she goes up 50 feet to paint it

Tiffany Brooks is getting a new perspective on Riverside history — from 50 feet up.

Six days a week, Brooks paints a mural on the back wall of downtown’s four-story Loring Building, which dates to 1890. Her subjects are the Loring Building itself as well as the nearby Mission Inn and the Fox Theater, both dating to the early 20th century.

The mural’s dimensions: an astonishing 40 feet tall and 110 feet wide. That’s like dozens and dozens of normal-sized canvases, plus a doubles tennis court.

Brooks goes up in a hydraulic boom lift, as if she were doing construction. She mounts the platform and uses controls to make the crane-like arm lift her up and around to the desired spot, where she sketches or paints in the hot sun for hours.

Anyone passing by on Mission Inn Avenue a half-block east of Market Street will see her at work, one, two or three stories up. A painter on a boom lift? That makes Brooks the living embodiment of Riverside’s motto, “The City of Arts and Innovation.”

When I visit the site on Thursday morning, Brooks is about 40 feet up. She calls down to me cheerily, then uses the toggle controls to move the lift away from the wall and lower it to the ground. Piercing beeps go off the entire time.

“Learning to operate this was so fun,” Brooks enthuses once she’s back on asphalt. The rental company gave her a one-hour lesson, but in many respects she’s had to teach herself.

“I feel really confident on it,” she says of the boom. “I feel like I’m driving a car.”

Minutes into our conversation, we’re joined by Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson, who greets Brooks with a hug, eyes the mural and exclaims: “It’s so fabulous!”

Brooks maneuvers the platform into place for us. Lock Dawson cracks to me: “Now she’s a heavy equipment operator as well as an artist.”

We climb in and the lift begins rising. I have my notebook and pen in one hand and my phone in the other. Oh, for a third hand to grip the open car’s railing.

“How far up are we going?” I ask, as nonchalantly as I can manage.

“Fifty feet!” Brooks replies.

I consider joking that no one asked me to sign a waiver, but swallow the thought.

Brooks moves the platform so that we face the wall squarely, then gets us into the right spot, next to the word “Riverside,” all requiring jerky, stop-and-go movements. But then we are gliding smoothly toward the wall, coming to a rest a foot away.

Brooks hands a brush to Lock Dawson — who wonders aloud why she chose Thursday to wear a white pantsuit — and asks her to paint over a line of chalk still visible on the second R in Riverside. Asked if I’d like a turn, I say sure, and add a couple of brushstrokes to the inside of the R.

“We put our mark on it, literally,” the mayor says.

Back on the ground safely, Brooks tells us about the concept of three postcard-like images: a Model T in front of the Mission Inn, an early electric car in front of the Loring Building and a Red Car trolley in front of the Fox.

(Perhaps one day a mural will depict an 18-wheeler on the 91.)

Brooks, who restored her own 1920s home, loves researching history and made sure to seek out photos to get the mural details right.

The boom lift sits in a small parking lot and alley that has history itself. The Loring Opera House, which became the Golden State Theater, occupied the site until a devastating 1990 fire. When the building was razed, the back wall of the adjacent Loring Building was exposed.

Some three decades later, that wall is now a giant canvas for this mural.

Lock Dawson’s Beautify Riverside initiative is responsible for commissioning multiple murals around town, all privately funded. This one is the largest.

They’ve become points of interest and selfie spots. “It broadcasts a message to people that we value art,” the mayor says. “It just makes the city more interesting.”

Brooks didn’t find the city interesting at all when she arrived here from Newport Beach as a surly teenager. “I hated it with all the passion of a ’70s beach girl,” she says. But over time she began to appreciate the beauty of the city’s historic core.

After Rubidoux High, a job at a paint store taught her about paint, colors and interior design. She’s been “resident artist” at the Mission Inn since 1997 and her projects around town have included restoration of the stenciled ceilings at the Fox.

Now, says Brooks, “you couldn’t drag me out of here. I love this city so much.”

The mural was conceived and begun by a different artist who had to relinquish the job for health reasons, with only a giant magnolia painted. Brooks took over in June.

The mural is, in more ways than one, her biggest challenge yet.

The scale is part of it. She traced her drawings onto a transparency, laid a grid over that with one-inch squares, then used string and chalk to create 3-foot grids on the wall itself.

The stucco surface is hard to paint on. Vents and earthquake bolts have to be worked around. Then there’s the intense heat.

Six days a week — every day but Saturday — Brooks works from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. with a two-hour break for lunch and rest.

She listens to music, chews gum to create a rhythm to her movements and drinks water — which is usually hot, since she can’t keep it cold for long. The afternoon sun beats down on the west-facing wall. Brooks tied three umbrellas to her cage railing for shade.

Everything she needs — buckets of paint, 35 brushes, chalk, markers, string, a level and a straight-edge — is on the platform. “It’s literally an art studio on a moving plank,” Brooks says.

Adding to the challenge, “it’s really windy up there. It’s like being on a ship. There’s a lot of motion,” she says. “The first week, I felt motion sickness whenever I was up there. Now I feel motion sickness when I’m back on the ground.”

Deadline for the mayor’s office to return the lift is Aug. 18. Brooks doubts she can finish by then, but she definitely has to be done on Aug. 24, as she’s leaving for Ireland the next day.

“There’ll be later hours as the time gets closer,” Brooks muses. “I may start to work Saturdays.”

David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, his canvas. Email [email protected], phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.

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