‘A ray of sunshine’: New Wheaton mural brightens downtown plaza

Peru Dyer Jalea has created murals in Canada and Japan, for music festivals and skate parks, with a mood-boosting color palette.

How such an internationally prolific artist, a Montreal resident, came to downtown Wheaton to complete a new community mural started with a direct message on Instagram.

Members of the Wheaton Fine and Cultural Arts Commission championed the project to give a retaining wall a happy burst of color in a sit-down plaza outside of the city’s French Market pavilion.

“When they found my work, it almost seemed to be meant for it, like they wanted something modern and colorful and vibrant and uplifting, but unique at the same time and in a way representative of their town,” Jalea said.

Randy King, a Wheaton arts commissioner, came across Jalea’s murals in Chicago and downtown Skokie. He was able to track down the artist better known as Peru143.

“We thought for a gateway to downtown Wheaton, after a plain, gray wall of being there, wouldn’t it be nice to have, even in the coldest of winter days, a ray of sunshine when you come by here,” said King, who with Lewis Achenbach, the arts commission chair, showed Jalea’s work to the city council.

Jalea brightened that formerly gray wall with spray paint and a distinctive puzzle-like design. The a-ha moment: Geometric shapes within the mural spell out WHEATON.

“He calls it his vocabulary of joy, which is, sometimes, just like the sun shape or leaf shapes, stuff that takes him back to being a kid, and the stuff that you remember that makes you happy and makes us all really just go like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s gonna be a good day,’ even if it’s not,” Achenbach said.

Some people have noticed the red, orange and yellow sunrise or thought the “T” in WHEATON looked like the Fermilab tower. That geographic marker is not meant to be immediately evident.

“That’s what I loved as a kid, when I was growing up, and every time I visited a work of art. Sometimes I would find that there were things that I would … discover each time I visited,” Jalea said.

Jalea aims to “lift people’s spirits” with his art.

“A lot of art is political, and we all know what the state of the world is and all the things we deal with, but we need to focus on the positive and raise the frequency … and make people a little happier,” he said.

Jalea has worked with the medium of spray paint for almost 30 years. His process is usually freehanded, intuitive.

“I tend to kind of shift things around and move things so that all the lines meet and everything’s parallel, and all the curves are round, and everything is clean, so that when you look at it, you don’t know why, but it gives you a sense of peace and calm,” Jalea said.

Mission accomplished. The reaction to the recently unveiled mural has been “joyous,” Achenbach said.

“Right off the bat, everybody loves it,” he said. “It’s got so much color.”

King and Achenbach, together a wellspring of ideas, have proposed a projection mapping system to further enliven the mural wall. If you’ve been to “Illumination,” the holiday lights show at the Morton Arboretum, you’ve seen how projection mapping makes a static wall of trees appear to breathe or gently sway from side to side.

Similarly, “we would have a system here that could turn this into a palette for nighttime art displays, and that’s something you could open up that is seasonal,” King said.

The artist he connected with on Instagram has made the plaza more of an Instagrammable gathering spot. Visitors are invited to share their pictures in front of the mural with the hashtag #Wheatonpublicart.

The hope is “that this provides the impetus to move to the next level and keep doing this sort of thing,” King said. “And that’s why we’re here...how do we celebrate the arts and allow people to participate in it and make people happy.”