Kent Twitchell Mural Apprenticeship
1986–1994 · photo

Kent Twitchell Mural Apprenticeship

Role: Apprentice / assistant painterSelf-reported
Fine Art
Fine art — painting & drawing
Illustration

  1. The problem

    Learning to paint at architectural scale cannot be taught in a classroom.

  2. The approach

    Apprentice directly under a defining figure of the American mural renaissance.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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.

Close-up of the LA Marathon Mural, showing several life-size painted runners on a freeway retaining wall with palm trees and hills behind
The LA Marathon Mural ("Voyage LA"), 1986–1989 — 26 life-size runners painted on a CalTrans wall along the 405 Freeway in Inglewood.

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.
Kent Twitchell seated in his studio in front of large-scale panels of the in-progress Michael Jackson mural
Kent Twitchell in the studio with the Michael Jackson "Smooth Criminal" mural underway — the piece Gavin assisted on during his RISD leave.
Graphite hand study drawing, likely preparatory work for the Michael Jackson mural
A graphite hand study from the same period — the kind of preparatory drawing an apprentice does before touching the wall.
Harbor Freeway Overture, an eight-story mural of musicians painted on the side of a downtown Los Angeles parking structure
Harbor Freeway Overture, completed 1994 — an eight-story, three-panel monument to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on the 7+Fig parking structure.
Detail view of the Harbor Freeway Overture mural, showing three musician panels against a downtown Los Angeles skyline
Detail of the three musician panels, downtown LA rising behind them.

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.

Independent mural work

The apprenticeship wasn’t the end of the mural painting — Gavin later painted a mural independently for the Bank of Rhode Island, applying what he’d learned under Twitchell to his own commissioned work rather than assisting on someone else’s. Details on that piece (year, scale, location) are still being confirmed; see its own page for what’s currently documented.

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.

Kent Twitchell Mural ApprenticeshipKent Twitchell Mural ApprenticeshipKent Twitchell Mural ApprenticeshipKent Twitchell Mural ApprenticeshipKent Twitchell Mural ApprenticeshipKent Twitchell Mural ApprenticeshipKent Twitchell Mural Apprenticeship
Outcome
Independently verified via Wikipedia, ABC7, CBS8, Google Arts & Culture, and the Mural Conservancy of LA
Scale
Three named murals across two periods, 1986–89 and early 1990s
Skills
mural-paintingillustrationfine-artcomposition
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