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On small-town public art around the USA


Patty and I just got back from driving around the Ohio River valley in Southern Illinois, researching a travel article. We went over the river to Paducah, Kentucky, for a few hours, where I saw a series of about 15 large-scale murals painted onto the landward side of the flood walls. A lot of towns around the USA boast about the murals painted on the sides of buildings around town. Some of them are OK, some of them are extremely bad, but rarely do you find paintings of this standard. They were done by someone called Robert Dafford (plus a team of assistants), and I thought that they went beyond the usual brief of showing the history of the region. The design and colour sense, and the level of drawing, was very fine indeed. Here's another one:


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