New mural celebrates monsoon, brightens Buckeye intersection

I tried to get as much as I could of the Arizona landscape and what makes Arizona wonderful jammed into this one, and then try to also capture as much as I could about Buckeye and its past and its wildlife.”

Joe Pagac

By Steve Stockmar
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Editor's note: This article originally appeared in Sun Life Magazine, an Independent Newsmedia publication.

As an artist Joe Pagac was looking for more, in addition to the residential jobs and canvas works for galleries he’d been doing. What he wanted was scale. What we wanted was to bring his paint brushes to wall- and even building-sized murals.

An artist cousin of his offered some pretty straightforward advice.

“He said just go paint one, and then you’ll be known as that guy who paints them,” Pagac (pronounced PAJ-ack) recalled.

Uncannily simple, it paid off.

Helped by a crowdfunding platform initially, Pagac started off in his hometown of Tucson where he transformed a 4,000-square-foot wall in 2017. Calls started pouring in with work offers, and ever since Pagac’s murals have graced entire walls on schools, businesses, museums and more, and not just around Tucson. He has a handful of murals up in Alaska, four around Washington, D.C., including a nine-story depiction of saxophone master Buck Hill, and he’s booked for jobs through 2027.

“I get a ton of calls for doing more giant boots around Texas,” he admitted.

One of those gigs came from the city of Buckeye in the Southwest Valley, which was looking to add colorful life to the otherwise drab 200-foot long by eight-foot high brick wall at the city’s water campus offsite well at the intersection of Verrado Way and Van Buren Street. The mural’s central theme is “desert storms/desert rain,” and the city’s community services advisory board was offering $56,000 to cover painting, design, materials, time and any travel to and from Buckeye.

Conceptual designs went back and forth between Pagac and the city and included public input to ultimately highlight the water cycle of the desert, Valley monsoons, local wildflowers, the agricultural background of the area and the Gila River, on a depiction that encompasses both a night and day scene.

“I’m an Arizona native and I love hiking and being outdoors, and I love the monsoon season,” Pagac said. “I tried to get as much as I could of the Arizona landscape and what makes Arizona wonderful jammed into this one, and then try to also capture as much as I could about Buckeye and its past and its wildlife.”

One end of the new 200-foot long mural in Buckeye.

(Photo provided by the city of Buckeye)

Pagac spent all of February bringing the depiction to life before wrapping up in March.

He learned he’d been selected for the mural while he was bicycling across South America, which included time in between bike miles fine-tuning the design while seeking Wi-Fi signals as he traveled from town to town with his iPad to communicate with the city’s Arts & Culture Division.

“When I’m going into a new town you’ve got to figure out what those people think of as iconic for them and what they want to capture there,” he said. “If I’m coming into a city I’ve never been in before, what I see as an outsider may be very different from what the locals want to see every day when they’re driving to work.”

Valley residents have seen Pagac’s murals before, and there’s still more to come.

His work has regularly been featured on walls at Crescent Ballroom in downtown Phoenix, and for a time every First Friday along Roosevelt Row he would come up from Tucson to paint a new temporary mural.

Pagac’s paint over the years has added to what he estimates is two inches of paint layers from various artists over more than two decades of commissioned murals on the Rialto Theatre wall in Tucson. And although the hot Arizona summer is putting a temporary end to his outdoor mural season for a while, Pagac has a gig coming up on the side of a Goodyear business this fall as well as a shopping center wall in Peoria.

When he’s not picking up his brushes to beautify a flat surface somewhere in Arizona, Pagac is an avid hiker and cyclist who looks for originality on trips that he can apply to his art.

“(Painting) allows me the freedom to do things like go on bike trips and extended hiking trips and get out for more inspiration because I tend to try to do a whole lot of nature work and I like to subtly push people toward appreciating nature and landscape and work towards saving the environment a little bit if I can and being a little kinder to animals,” he said.

“Hopefully it makes people work a little harder to take care of the desert around them.”

A look at the “before” on how the 200-foot by eight-foot wall at the city of Buckeye’s water campus offsite well had looked previously.

(Photo provided by the city of Buckeye)

A drone shot shows the “after” look of artist Joe Pagac’s mural.

(Photo provided by the city of Buckeye)

Some of the resident feedback during the concept design included wanting Gila Monsters to be depicted on the mural, as seen shortly after Joe Pagac completed the work in March.

(Photo provided by the city of Buckeye)

Artist Joe Pagac has new murals commissioned for this fall in Goodyear and in Peoria.

(Photo provided by Joe Pagac)

Steve Stockmar
News Editor | Sun Life Magazine & Arts & Entertainment YourValley.net

sstockmar@iniusa.org

Meet Steve
Steve Stockmar joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2017, and has been an Arizona journalist for almost 30 years. He serves as editor of Sun Life Magazine and contributes to West Valley communities where he focuses mostly on arts & culture, education, and profiles of neighbors making a difference.

Community: Every season Steve serves as a “buddy” with the Miracle League of Arizona in Scottsdale, has volunteered his time with Family Promise in Glendale, and previously served on the Ghostlight Theatre board in Sun City West.

Education: Graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff with a Journalism major and English minor.

Random Fact: Steve once won a 50-player live Texas Hold ’Em poker tournament.

Hobbies: Anguishing over his beloved Chicago Cubs and Bears; listening to Beatles and Grateful Dead music.