Question: What’s 555 feet long, 229 feet wide and is red, white and blue all over?
Answer: It’s one of the latest large-scale public art works by renowned marine artist Wyland: A massive American flag painted on the roof of the boat storage building at Legendary Marine in Destin, Florida.
Record-setting community effort
Completed in April 2016, the flag mural is a community partnership of Legendary Marine, Sherwin-Williams and the Wyland Foundation, a nonprofit organization the artist established to promote, protect and preserve oceans, waterways and marine life. The foundation encourages environmental awareness through education programs, community events and public art projects.
The completed mural covers an impressive 3.8 acres – just under the size of three football fields – and is listed as the world’s largest mural of a flag by the Guinness Book of World Records. Fitting, since it was painted on the roof of the world’s largest single indoor marine building.
High performance coatings
The project is intended to honor the armed forces who defend our country and the first responders who watch over and protect our communities, Wyland says.
The red stripes of the flag were painted with Sher-Cryl™ High Performance Acrylic in Safety Red. The rest was painted with Pro Industrial™ Multi-Surface Acrylic Coating, a dryfall-type coating that provides alkyd-like hardness.
The dryfall quality was an important consideration on this project due to the building’s location on the water with lots of nearby boat and car traffic, says Veronica Trout, Sherwin-Williams Florida Panhandle District Manager. The product also provides excellent color and gloss retention as well as high hide and good stain resistance.
Turning vision into reality
This wasn’t Wyland’s first project in Destin, a city of 12,000 people in northwest Florida. With the help of local volunteers, he also painted “Marine Life of the Gulf,” one of his 100 whaling wall murals, at Legendary Marine, as well as a smaller flag as a patriotic gesture after 9/11. But he had even bigger ideas this time around.
Thanks to his vision and the support of Legendary Marine and Sherwin-Williams, the world’s largest American flag mural is now a reality.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2016 issue of PPC magazine. Story by Mike Starling, PPC editor. Photography courtesy Legendary Marine. Read about other successful painting projects in the PPC digital archive.