Homage to Bernard’s Garage

A chance meetup with an old friend led to me submitting design concepts for a large scale mural on a new apartment building going up in downtown Milwaukie, Oregon (just outside of Portland). I’d like to say my designs were so good that they had no choice but to hire me, but I think the truth is more like I won by default. I was one of three artists who submitted designs but one backed out and the other moved to the east coast, and I was the only one left standing. Hey… a win is a win.

The new building was going up on the site of an old automotive repair shop that specialized in axle repairs. The shop was called Bernard’s and was a staple of Milwaukie businesses. The shop had been there for years, and was well known by its iconic wrench head neon sign with the bright red B inside of it.

My first round of designs I submitted were typical Jerry… very abstract Graffiti, very angular and bold, solid colors. The client encouraged me to bring something more to the existing designs that paid tribute to the Bernard’s, and to the name of the apartment building - Axletree. So I dove back into the design process, added the collage/pattern of the exploded axle diagrams, and added the neon wrench from Bernard’s but put the Axletree apartment A logomark inside the wrench. The client loved it and signed off.

I hired my best friend Patrick McGregor and his son Tristan from Esoteric Art to help out as this was going to be a big project. After a solid week of 10 hour days… it was done. The city of Milwaukie, and especially the Milwaukie Arts Council, were pretty happy with it, the client was pretty happy with it, and the three of us were happy with our work. Hopefully the mural stays for quite some time.