Sunset Subliminal

I like the idea of the streets being the gallery,” says Mike McNeilly, the mega-cool, ultra laid-back artist responsible for those giant advertising murals on the sides of Sunset Strip buildings. And although McNeilly prefers murals that draw attention to national problems and upright issues, he mostly paints foot-high celebrity nostrils--and other disproportionately huge facial features--of the likes of Robin Williams and Glenn Close to promote their upcoming movies.

The Strip’s nine so-called Tall Walls turn over three to six times a year. Some of the ads McNeilly and his team handle are vinyl panels literally glued into place, but the most spectacular are painted using techniques similar to those of Renaissance frescoes.

“We take the original art, enlarge it in a studio, then make patterns that are gridded onto the wall,” McNeilly explains. “One inch on the original might equal one square foot. We’re creating thousands of little paintings that become one big painting.”

The “wall dogs,” as the artists refer to themselves, encounter certain risks. “A Santa Ana that seems calm down on the street might be 30, 40, 50 mph up on the side of a building,” McNeilly says.

Such exacting, potentially dangerous work is not without its lighter moments. “We just finished a Gap mural that had a very sexy girl--tight little T-shirt, tight jeans,” McNeilly says. “The new image was a good-looking guy, so we started at the top, put the guy’s head on the girl’s body, and then decided to take lunch.”

Indeed. Just the sort of nonconformist (read: hilarious) behavior one would expect from a guy who admits to having “no serious art background at all. Zero. I was the only 8-year-old kid whose dad gave him Playboys and said, ‘Here, learn to draw.’ ”

Which may also explain the messages McNeilly and his crew hide within the giant pictures.

“There are lots in murals that have a lot of detail,” McNeilly admits. “ ‘Where’s Waldo?’ types of things. We might paint so that at certain times of day or night, the brush strokes pick up the light differently--the message might only appear between 5 and 7 in the evening. What goes on in the artist’s mind is, ‘My girlfriend would really like her name on this wall,’ or ‘It’s coming up on my kid’s birthday.’ We just painted over the last one we did. The Hanes wall [with Tina Turner] had a very strong subliminal.”

Then McNeilly politely refuses to elaborate. “The thing is, I would have to give you a good example, and it’d spoil the fun if I told you what to look for.”

Thanks a lot, buddy.