Magical Mystery Mural: How John Van Hamersveld and TRC Turned an Empty Oil Tank into a Work of Art

When he was a student at El Segundo High School in the late 1950s, John Van Hamersveld used to drive his Volkswagen Beetle up the hill on Grand Avenue just about every day. But as a typical California teenager, he was too busy thinking about other things – surfing, girls, rock ‘n’ roll – to notice the industrial landscape around him.????

“You’d come up the hill and there was Hyperion on the left and Standard Oil on the right, but you just excused it and went into this little town,” he says.

Little did he know that one day he’d make the massive oil tank at the top of the hill impossible to miss.

Three weeks ago Van Hamersveld did just that, unveiling the largest work of his long, storied career: a massive mural that cloaks the three-story oil tank on Grand Avenue in a collage of surf-inspired psychedelia. TRC, which hired Van Hamersveld to create the mural on behalf of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, oversaw the installation of the art work on the hulking tank. The 510-foot long mural was installed in 51 sections, each 10 feet wide by 32 feet tall.

“John is a champion and artistic visionary for El Segundo,” says Suzanne Fuentes, the former mayor who first approached Van Hamersveld about doing the mural. “We are so proud of this beautiful and momentous work of art he created … he’s now helped establish our city as an artistic must-see.”

A Life of Sun and Surf

Van Hamersveld grew up in Palos Verdes but used to drive the 16 miles up the coast to attend El Segundo High School. As a kid he got bit by the surfing bug and eventually combined his passion for big waves with his budding artistic skills. After attending art school, he got involved with the burgeoning surf magazine industry.

His big break came in 1964 when he was asked by friend and filmmaker Bruce Brown to design the poster for the seminal surf film “The Endless Summer.” The bright, simple poster evoked the promise and allure of 1960s California and remains popular to this day.

After a second stint in art school, Van Hamersveld was hired as art director at Capitol Records. Within weeks he was busy designing the cover of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. Over the next decade Van Hamersveld became a fixture in the rock world, designing album covers for the likes of the Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead, KISS and Blondie.?

“When people say you did that cover and that cover and that cover -?no, it was much larger than that,” he says with a laugh. “It was a worldwide media campaign. It’s not just the album cover but billboards and ads and posters and all kinds of different things that are done for the promotion of the group.”

His best known cover is the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. – which spawned a famous billboard on Sunset Boulevard that Van Hamersveld designed. That billboard served as a bridge from the 12x12 album covers and posters to the larger-than-life-size works he would go on to create.

The first of those came in 1984 for the summer Olympics in Los Angeles, a mural that was 12 feet tall and longer than a football field. Since then he’s done several murals around California – but none of them as big as El Segundo.

Tackling the Tank

The El Segundo mural started with a local resident asking city officials if anything could be done about the old oil tank, which is visible from numerous spots around town. Whatever color the tank was originally, it was now mostly dark brown thanks to a thick layer of rust.?

Last September Van Hamersveld was inducted into the El Segundo High School Hall of Fame. In the cafeteria after the event, he was approached by Fuentes and asked about doing the mural.

LADWP, which now owns the former oil tank, agreed to pay for the project. TRC, which was handling the decommissioning and razing of LADWP’s Scattergood Unit 3 across the street, was tasked with figuring out how to affix the mural to the tank, doing the prep work, installing the framing for the panels and hanging them up.?

For the most part, the tank was a blank slate for Van Hamersveld.

“Luckily,” he says. “Most of the time with commission work you get a lot of dictation that comes in from the side. You have to fight with it sometimes. This was open. The only condition I had is that it had to have a wave. So it has 15 waves in it.”

Despite the enormous size of the mural, Van Hamersveld started work on it the way he has all the others – armed with black Sharpies and large sketching surfaces.

“I draw everything out first,” he says. “Everything’s drawn and then it goes into the computer and is turned into vector files and moved around as a collage. The color comes with the computer.”

The Finished Product

The result is an homage to surfing and a pastiche of Van Hamersveld’s previous work, a massive Day-Glo mash-up of the numerous pop art icons he’s created over the last half century: the Johnny Face, Jimi Hendrix with electric hair, the skull head with the tongue hanging out. So the mural serves as both a snapshot of Van Hamersveld’s early life and a retrospective of his entire career.??

“Yeah, that’s the way I kind of faced it,” he says. “I said I’d put the waves up. The wave is the eternal world that goes by through time and below that are these symbols that are my work over time, so putting that together is sort of an interesting collage.”

While the mural is very much about California, it also has ties to Las Vegas – namely a massive, digital mural Van Hamersveld did for the Fremont Street Experience in 2010. That “Signs of Life” work featured many of the same visual elements in a swirling, mind-bending overhead video that played along to the Zombies’ “Time of the Season.” The HD trip unfurls on a 1,500-foot screen that’s 30 yards wide and 90 feet off the ground.

?“Really that’s the beginning of the mural,” Van Hamersveld says. “You see the clouds in there, and you see the cats and you see all these different symbols. It has a big relationship to the tank.”

But the tank has a bigger presence. It looms off in the distance, sitting there on the hill around the clock, 365 days a year. Its potential audience is impossible to calculate.?

“The most interesting part of it is at various heights of altitude in El Segundo you can see it on the horizon and in silhouette it’s like 250 feet wide,” says Van Hamersveld. “So it’s really an amazing gallery image to be able to put that out. And also the jets flying out of LAX looking to the left can see it from the sky. So you see the whole Hyperion complex and there’s an art piece there sitting on their industrial acreage.”

Van Hamersveld is also excited about the mural being shrunk down to fit onto smartphone screens and enjoyed in real time by people who have never stepped foot in California.

“It becomes social media because people take pictures of it and send it around to each other, and it will be seen that way on the phone, on Facebook, on Instagram,” he says, a hint of amazement in his voice.?

That’s something else he never would have imagined while tooling around in his Beetle all those years ago.??