GARDEN GROVE – This city of 175,000 people wants an image overhaul, a Hail Mary pass that’ll tell the world about its agricultural roots, through the generations, and still touch down into today.
Garden Grove seeks a new identity as a vibrant, multicultural mecca that’s renewed, revitalized, thriving, even … edgy.
So, with that in mind, there’s this wall spanning the south side of the Gem Theatre at Main Street and Acacia Parkway, in the heart of downtown. The wall used to be burnt orange; blah.
City Councilman Steve Jones saw this wall as a reclamation project, a potential billboard for all things that Garden Grove wants to tell residents and visitors.
“But we needed an artist who’d capture what the city wants to be,” Jones said before rattling off adjectives like “exciting,” “edgy” and “reborn.”
Jones, a USC graduate, sought out that artist.
Todd Marinovich is a former USC and NFL quarterback with deep ties to Orange County. His harrowing (and very public) battle with drug addiction, and his resulting police docket, has made him someone a lot of public figures wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot paint roller.
“Exactly!” Jones gushed.
“Can you think of anyone more symbolic of comebacks?”
This wall, like this column, isn’t about the past. It’s about the present and future of a city, and Marinovich, who has reinvented himself as an artist.
We’ll skip over Marinovich’s controversial, cautionary-tale past as the “Robo QB” bred for football achievement by a controlling father; a guy pushed to the limits before getting lost in demons and drugs.
We won’t even ask Marinovich, now 45 and living in Oceanside with his wife and two children, ages 5 and 3, whether he’s clean.
Nobody asked before the city commissioned the $20,000 mural that has consumed Marinovich’s attention for three weeks. It will be unveiled Oct. 12 as part of a grand community event, “Re:Imagine Garden Grove – A Downtown Open Streets Event.”
Until then, both Marinovich and the 25-by-30-foot mural he’s painting will be surrounded and shielded by green tarps and two-story-high chain-link fencing.
Floodlights and a generator on loan from the city’s police department illuminate the wall, allowing Marinovich to work late into the night.
On Friday, an electric lift from the city’s public works department carried Marinovich 20 feet high on his concrete canvas. He was alone with his art; tall, sun-soaked and shirtless.
His black board shorts clung low and loosely to his hips. A blue T-shirt wrapped around his tightly shorn strawberry blond hair. His arms are slender but still cut, shaking and stretching spray paint cans toward the wall for the hiss and splash of bright color.
“Hello,” he said from his elevated perch, sounding somewhat reluctant to have a journalist come by and stir up the old, tired trouble he’d rather cover up with paint.
He descended to street level, patted himself dry with a towel, guzzled a bottled water and lit a cigarette.
“I got chills when they asked me to do this project,” said Marinovich, who has no personal tie to the city. “I have some ideas about where I want this mural to go, but I’m mostly letting the art flow.”
People drop by all the time, cops mainly, and former fans. They ask him about football; they want photos with him or autographs from him.
Football was another life. Marinovich doesn’t throw the ball other than with his children. He doesn’t watch college or NFL games; the sport provides him little joy.
“I’m into this,” he said, looking at the giant, still-mostly-blank wall with the image of tree roots extending from the top and digging into the center.
These roots, literal representations of the city’s agricultural heritage, and symbols of the families who’ve lived here for generations, are powerfully rendered. They’re mottled, hundreds of sprayed, brushed and layered strips. They’re as sinewy as muscles. And they evoke a kinetic energy of sorts, as the colors – red, brown, beige, purple, orange, yellow, cooling white – bleed into one another.
No section of Marinovich’s mural is complete. He restrains his impulses to add more color, more motion, more emotion. He checks himself constantly, painting and repainting and pausing, careful not to overwork any one segment. Still, he knows he can always take out the white roller and start over at any time and in any place.
“That’s the beauty of art,” he said. “You can control it.”
Because this is a community project, Marinovich has invited local elementary students to come and paint on the largest piece he has ever attempted. He has incorporated their scribbles, doodles and handprints in the lower sections into the mural, corralling their abstractions into two reptilian creatures.
“Being able to add art to the art just pushes this piece into another direction,” he said, grabbing two spray-paint cans and heading back to work.
He walked to the wall and dotted sections with hot pink. Then he dipped a sponge into a quart of yellow acrylic paint and began dabbing impressions along the bottom right.
Marinovich is making something new out of something old. He has done this for himself, becoming the artist.
A reclamation project doing a reclamation project, Marinovich puts up a wall as the heart of a city seeks its own comeback.
Contact the writer: masmith@ocregister.com