S ince 1974 Robert Fishbone has created hundreds of site-specific big art in St. Louis and around the country. Today, Fishbone and his daughter, Liza, still make murals together as On the Wall Productions, the family business founded by Fishbone and his late wife, Sarah Lindquist, who died in 2010 at the age of 58.
The company, and its murals, have become an integral part of the landscape in St. Louis for good reasons. “On the Wall murals create murals that convey the character of a town with color and imagery that reflects its identity and sense of place,” Alton resident and business owner Penny Schmidt says.
“Their murals are a collaborative effort. Robert invites people into the process. For the ‘Alton Flyway Audubon’ mural, we brought 15 to 20 organizations and individuals together to contribute to the mural.
There was a real sense of cohesiveness and connection to each other, which is a wonderful thing in this divisive time.” Their vibrant murals can be good for private businesses, too, like the “Nothing Impossible” mural Robert and Liza painted for STL Style business owners Randy and Jeff Vines at Cherokee Street and Compton Avenue. “It wasn’t just ‘Oh yeah, we can put up a neat mural,’” Randy Vines says.
“Robert and Liza actually spent a week coming into our shop every day, to observe, to watch the flow and how we interact with our customers in the neighborhood. Something as simple as turning a blank wall into an art canvas can transform a building aesthetically. The mural created a landmark on Cherokee that makes the urban landscape a lot more interesting.
” Murals today are economic drivers throughout the country, according to Tracey Morgan, American Rescue Plan Act program lead for the Regional Arts Commission’s St. Louis mural project. Twenty-eight new murals commissioned by RAC from local artists are now appearing on buildings in 14 St.
Louis neighborhoods. “The murals advance economic development through cultural tourism. People are coming here from all over the country to look at the mural project all throughout the city.
We have an interactive map on our website dedicated to the project. It also has recommendations for nearby stores and restaurants,” Morgan says. The hundreds of murals he helped create don’t reflect one style; a fundamental value for Robert Fishbone.
“From the beginning Sarah and I saw ourselves as problem solvers as much as artists because all our work is site specific,” Fishbone says. The beginnings He and Sarah painted “Wally,” their first mural, in 1974. The four-panel piece followed the metamorphosis of a caterpillar in a chrysalis to its emergence as a beautiful butterfly.
They hadn’t planned to paint a mural when “Wally” winged in. They met as students at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The possibility of working in a new medium brought them to St.
Louis in 1973 after graduation. “We had this new portable video tool that could be used not just to document things, The grant never materialized, but they remained and shot non-commercial video in St. Louis.
“We did some pretty interesting video events at Duff’s Restaurant back in the day,” he says. Inventive stuff doesn’t always pay the bills, so they took part-time jobs. One was delivering St.
Louis Today, an alternative newspaper published during a strike. “We delivered them to about 10 places around town. One day we read an article about someone from the St.
Louis Beautification Commission who wanted to see more murals in downtown St. Louis,” he says. “We had friends at college who had done murals so we knew it could be done.
Sarah was a good traditional fine artist, and I had experience in doing big complicated technical projects, so we thought ‘murals — that sounds about right,’” he says. They soon met with Robert Orchard, an unabashed supporter of the arts. “He turned out to be this off-beat character with a successful business of his own and an incredible art collection,” Fishbone says.
“He said ‘OK, there’s a guy downtown who has a wall who is interested in a mural. Why don’t you go down there and do some designs?’ So we did. We presented to Orchard and the building owner.
We did the mural. Twenty-three friends helped us paint. “The public reaction to ‘Wally’ was over the top,” he says.
“We became instant celebrities. We even got fan mail from secretaries who worked in the building across the street who didn’t have to look at a blank wall any longer.” Commissions rolled in.
The two accidental muralists formalized On the Wall Productions in 1974. Their site-specific murals, targeted to the needs of clients, took off. The owner of a Volkswagen repair shop people couldn’t find hired them.
Robert and Sarah painted a croaking green frog around the entrance to the garage. Customers drove their VW Bugs right into its open mouth. In 1976 a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts funded five new murals in St.
Louis. “Each of those was a distinct project. For one, we worked with a group of Black artists to teach them how to do big murals, then we did a beautiful mural with them on the North Side,” Fishbone says.
Funded by a North Side storefront church, they painted “The Wall of Strength” that same year to improve a wall covered with decayed signs. The mural revels in something the the wall saw — the strength and optimism of the youth of the neighborhood. Fishbone spotted a group of kids cooling off in the spray of a fire hydrant.
When he asked permission to take a photo, they posed and vogued for him, which inspired the mural. The Lindbergh Mural “We had several murals up when we started on the Lindbergh mural,” Fishbone says of the iconic portrait of the dashing aviator that covered a wall on the Lion Gas building in 1977. The mural became a focal point in St.
Louis for celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of Lindbergh’s nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. The towering pixelated portrait wasn’t generated on a computer. “This was pre-computer.
Our process was all analog in 1977,” Fishbone says. “I remembered an article I read in Scientific American, ‘The Recognition of Faces,’ which was about how little information you need to recognize somebody’s face,” he says. The article, published in 1973, was about researchers seeing how little information one needed to recognize a face.
One method of testing this was to use a computer to divide an image into squares and blur each square of the image. Fishbone connected with someone who worked on the project, and he and Sarah traveled to Connecticut to investigate. After the meeting, .
The black and white image of Lindbergh they got back for the 37-by-50-foot mural clocked in at 1,200 squares. At the time, the National Paint and Protective Coatings Association sponsored several historic murals in different cities. The St.
Louis president, Howard Jerome, contacted Fishbone and Sarah and asked if they had a mural in mind. “Lindy Squared” got the go-ahead. Fishbone’s tech background came to the fore.
He took the image with its squares to a photo engraver. They used a densitometer to measure the light reflectance of each square with black as zero and white as 100. “We wrote down the numerical reflective value for each square.
We combined a few, and ended up with 72 different shades of gray,” he says. When Sarah painted a sample canvas, it was a little off. She added a few more dark squares to make Lindy pop.
Robert’s technical experience combined with Sarah’s knowledge of fine art painting solved the problem. “Lindy Squared” put On The Wall Productions on the map. “To this day, when people meet me, they still say ‘Wow.
You painted Lindy Squared!’” he says. “The publicity we got made people realize we were the same people who painted nine or 10 murals around town. Because they were all so different, nobody knew the same artist did them all.
” Family business Each mural was an adventure. Fishbone and Sarah met with building owners and scoped out the architecture inside and out. They learned the history of the area through trips to the Missouri Historical Society.
“We would go to the library and take out 10 giant picture books because the only way to find pictures of anything was through books and magazines. There was no internet,” Fishbone says. “We would stand either on the roof or with our back to the wall and ask ourselves, ‘What does the wall see? What has this wall witnessed?’” he says.
“That was and still is our approach.” The success of “Lindy Squared” gained attention not only in St. Louis but also around the country.
Between 1974 and 1982 Robert and Sarah created murals as close as Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and far away as Anchorage, Alaska, as well as St. Louis projects.
In 1988 they became parents to a son, Tyler, and in 1990 their daughter, Liza, was born. Today, Liza works in the family business with her dad in addition her own creative work in Austin, Texas. Her company, Sneaky Planet Studios, brings fantasy to the fore with murals, immersive experiences, three-dimensional sculptures and storytelling art.
Liza grew up with a pencil in her hand. “I remember my first time on a job. I helped my parents draw out one of the murals on the Willert Building.
They said ‘Here’s your pencil. Go trace that line,’” Liza says. “Being around painters and all the supplies and tools became very normal to me,” she says.
“We had a mural closet in our house where my parents kept all the tools needed to go out on a job and a separate closet for paint clothes.” As she got older, she became less engaged with the mural painting. “I was a teenager, doing my own things, playing sports and doing school stuff,” she says.
She did earn money in high school working at the Muny in the scene shop. “My mom was the charge artist, and I was a paint person mixing paints, cleaning brushes, carrying buckets of water. I consider that to be my first big painting experience,” she says.
“I started doing murals professionally with my dad in 2015.” The mural they painted together was “66 Reasons to Love St. Louis,” a mural commissioned by Phillips 66 Co.
The company held a competition to determine who would paint the mural at KDHX community radio station in Grand Center. “Liza convinced me to enter,” Fishbone says. “I wasn’t doing murals so much but she said ‘Come on, Dad, I want to learn how to paint big murals from you!’ What dad would not jump at the chance to hear that?” Twenty teams entered and On the Wall won the competition.
Phillips 66 loved their design, but they also liked the father/daughter twist. One element had to be present in the mural — the Phillips 66 logo. “There were hot air balloons in the mural, so we put the logo on one of them in a fairly prominent place,” Fishbone says.
“A DJ at KDHX very publicly objected to the presence of the 66 logo in the mural and to the notion of corporations paying for public art, but that’s how a lot of art work gets done.” More murals A recent 2022 mural, “A Bee Named Bubbles,” drew only praise. Jeffrey Vines of STL Style lives in the DeMun neighborhood.
He paid Robert and Liza to develop a mural design for a wall that faces into a DeMun park. Fishbone and Liza researched the history of Clayton, they had conversations with residents and walked the neighborhood. Then Fishbone put his back to the wall.
“With my back to the wall, I realized it’s a playground. We were looking at the history of Clayton, and I knew we didn’t want to do that. A playground needs to be whimsical and light,” he says.
Father and daughter went through a long process of brainstorming and sketching. “When we work together it’s the convergence of two worlds,” Liza says. “He’s old school, I’m younger and more modern, so we find a balance in that.
” They settled on painting a giant bee, Bubbles, on a swing. Fishbone knew Liza’s color-blended, atmospheric style would work for Bubbles. “How she combines spray paint and brush strokes is just right.
Liza also wanted to super-size the bee.” Fishbone says, “and she was right about that, too.” The magic qualities of the park enchant kids and grown-ups alike.
“As my murals evolve I’m creating more fantasy landscapes,” Liza says. “It’s like opening a page in a picture book and stepping in.” Liza discovered she shared something with her mom through Sarah’s sketchbooks.
“She was full of imagination, creating other little worlds, which is what I do now,” Liza says. “When my dad and I work together, he’s definitely a super-pro with a logistical, mathematical mind. He knows so much about doing murals.
He loves setting things up, and laying out the work. I’m more like my mom. I bring the artistic vision and the painting skills to a job, much as she did,” she says.
Future projects Future work includes a restoration of the “World’s Mural” on the old Edison Brothers building at Highway 40 and 14th Street. Midas Hospitality, the developers for the building, commissioned Fishbone for the job, scheduled for spring 2025. In August 2025 when On The Wall Productions opens the 50th Anniversary retrospective show of work combined with events, talks, projects and fun at the Luminary it will technically be their 51st year painting the town, but folks will be able to see their oeuvre all in one place.
For Robert Fishbone and his children, it will be a poignant yet happy moment with lots of memories to share. “When people hire On The Wall, they’re hiring us because they have no idea what we’re going to come up with. It’s a big surprise.
In the early days, the 1970s, people would say let your creativity flow, and that’s what Liza and I do now,” Fishbone says..
