Those soaking up the sun in downtown Aurora will enjoy another visual treat when they pass along Broadway or Water Street—a new mural with portraits inspired by the Leland Bluebird Recording Sessions.
Taking place between 1937-38, these sessions heard titans of the Chicago and St. Louis blues scenes assemble to record tracks for the Bluebird Label at the former Leland Hotel.
The figures themselves—including Buddy Guy, Tampa Red, Koko Taylor, B.B. King, and Stevie Ray Vaughan—are an entry way into Aurora’s history with blues music. But the lyrical movement of the mural is where the music is. Instruction in fine art taught artist Max Sansing, who comes from the south side of Chicago, the math of painting—but his work in graffiti art taught him to embrace ambiguity, color, and a point of view.
The spontaneity and need for improv within his own creative process mirrors Sansing’s journey as a professional artist.
“My goal when I got to college was to be where I am now. But I’m where I want to be now—I just didn’t see the path [laid out for me],” Sansing said. Much like his own background, the artist’s finished products rarely follow a set, articulated plan. In his own words: “it’s not fun if you know exactly how it’s going to look in the end.”
Line work, form, and composition are all part of classical art training. Like music, there is structure, and designated components are necessary to the design. Yet in both mediums, so says Sansing, the fun begins with improvisation. The scatting, adlibs of the solos and shades, and the ultimate abstraction of the movement makes a song—or an art piece—unique.
Using bold colors and allowing fluidity in the concept allows Sansing to tell a story through his work, combining his own penchant for freedom to express mood and feeling with the grounded reality of the people he is portraying through his art.
It is no wonder Sansing has long been in demand to add to what City of Aurora Director & Curator of Public Art, Jen Byrne, calls Aurora’s walking art museum.
With commissioned work that has taken him across the country and around the globe, Sansing’s mural in Aurora is a homecoming of sorts.
When his father passed when Sansing was just 14, his uncle—who lived and still lives in Aurora—was a presence for him that grew the garden of creativity initially planted by his artist father.
Once his father passed, Sansing’s uncle drove from the suburbs to Chicago to bring him to his home, which Sansing found to be filled with art and comic books. An odyssey of creative exploration and expression began in earnest with Sansing’s uncle as his guide, nurturing his talent and filling what Sansing calls a void for both fatherly support and artistic encouragement.
His uncle’s style—including his early 1990’s Nissan Z convertible, which fascinated a then-14 Sansing—made a lasting impression on the artist, who still creates art with his uncle in mind. As he’s been driving out to Aurora to visit with his uncle, ever since he received his driver’s license, Sansing’s ability to produce a permanent piece of art in his uncle’s own city is a culmination of sorts of the influence the man has had on him.
“I know [they say] inspiration is a cliché thing, but I don’t think it is, especially when you’re a creative,” Sansing said.
— City of Aurora government
