Kent Twitchell Mural Apprenticeship
The problem
Learning to paint at architectural scale cannot be taught in a classroom.
The approach
Apprentice directly under a defining figure of the American mural renaissance.
What was built
Summers spent assisting on murals across Los Angeles from 1986, and again during a two-year leave from RISD in the early 1990s.
The outcome
Three named murals, independently verified via the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, Google Arts & Culture and broadcast coverage. The origin of the eye everything else rests on.
Usage note: per the 2026-07-14 positioning decision, this does not get its own case-study page. It’s About-page backstory — the origin of the “fine-art eye” the whole site’s thesis rests on. This file exists as clean, fully-sourced reference material for whoever writes that section.
At the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), starting in 1986, Gavin’s painting teacher was Kent Twitchell — one of the defining figures of the American mural renaissance, confirmed independently by the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles as having taught at LACHSA. Twitchell invited him to apprentice over several summers on murals across the city; his first credited work was the LA Marathon Mural (“Voyage LA”) — 26 runners on a CalTrans wall along the 405 Freeway in Inglewood, 1986–1989.
Years later, Gavin took a two-year leave from his BFA studies at RISD, in the early 1990s, to work with Twitchell again — on two major public murals:
- The Michael Jackson “Smooth Criminal” mural, commissioned by Jackson for the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood — roughly 100 feet tall by 60 feet wide, never installed due to the 1993–94 scandal, later exhibited in 2009 (“Thriller: The King of Pop Meets the King of Cool”). Independently confirmed via Wikipedia, ABC7, and CBS8.
- “Harbor Freeway Overture,” Twitchell’s monument to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra — an eight-story, three-panel mural on the 7+Fig parking structure downtown, completed 1994. Independently confirmed via Google Arts & Culture and Fine Art Conservation Laboratories.
That two-year leave also explains a previously unresolved gap in his RISD transcript — it wasn’t a lapse, it was two more years under a master muralist.
The through-line for the site: before Flash, before VFX, before gigapixel or VR or generative AI, there was a teenager hand-painting photorealistic portraits at architectural scale, taught by one of the people who defined the form. Everything since has been the same instinct — apprentice under what’s real, then go find the next medium — applied to seven different technologies in turn.
Trained as a muralist under Kent Twitchell before ever touching a computer.