January 26, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

Brighten up your laundry

by Jamie Schuman

Customers at AJ's Quick Clean Center in Midtown do not need to peer into the depths of a swirling load of colored laundry for visual stimulation. They need only look at the walls.

There, gigantic flowers and abstract designs of orange, turquoise and violet decoartte the walls - and many of the window sills and washing machines.

The murals are the work of local artist Francois Eril, who decided to cover the more subtle interior decorating with eye-popping allure.

The resulting art may never show at the Louvre, but it has made doing laundry at AJ's a livelier experience.

Midtown resident Marcia Laris has used AJ's Quick Clean Center occasionally for many years. She was surprised when she first saw the new décor last fall.

"It's added some life," she said on a recent Monday morning.

Other customers doing their laundry agreed.

Last summer, Eril, an occasional customer at AJ's and a regular at the coffee shop next-door, told laundry owner Chris Choi that the store's decor of fading, yellow wallpaper was simply depressing. Eril had to ask Choi a few times for permission to paint, but the owner eventually relented and gave Eril the funds for supplies.

The French-born artist with bright red hair quickly went to work and transformed the store in to its psychedelic state in just one and a half weeks last August.

Eril, a largely self-taught artist, said he didn't sketch the design before starting; it was "pure inspiration."

It was also pure perspiration: A heat wave struck in August and he did all of his painting - jumping on washers and dryers to reach the top of the wall - while the store was open and the machines were running.

The entire wall above the dryers is an abstract landscape called "Chris's Garden"; Choi's young son chose the name in honor of his dad. The large blocks of fuchsia, turquoise and orange most resemble a field of impressionistic flowers. The swirling nature of the piece echoes the swirling laundry in the dryers below.

"I like bright colors," Eril said. "They are almost alarming, and we are living in an almost alarming time."

A small panel to the right of "Chris's Garden" is an optical illusion: A turquoise woman is hidden in a pink bouquet of flowers.

Eril clearly likes to have fun with his art; he put an actual compact disc in one landscape to represent the moon or a UFO. And he doesn't just paint on the wall. At AJ's, machines have lips, clouds and flower bouquets on them, and many of the pipes got a color treatment too.

Some designs are personally meaningful to Eril. One pastel landscape reminds him of Normandy, France, where he grew up. And he named a white section with sharp red and black lines "The Fall of Berlin" because it reminds him of a painting of a Nazi temple being blown up.

Choi was accommodating in letting Eril take over his laundry center for the art project, but it wasn't just an act of charity. Choi said he likes art and also wants to please his customers.

"I'm a business man," Choi said. "It's good for my business."

Eril, a Midtown resident, originally hails from France, via San Francisco. He moved to Palo Alto seven years ago from San Francisco partly in search of a peaceful atmosphere in which to paint.

He said the neighborhood is "a good place for artists. You can relax more."

In France, he worked as a cook and in San Francisco, as a fashion designer. He said both careers helped his artwork. He's also read books on art, and studied the works of influential painters, such as Monet and Pablo Picasso.

Now he mainly supports himself through sales of his works. A struggling artist, he subsists almost solely on rice some weeks, he said, but does not want to give up on a career as an artist.

"It's what I live for, so I'm trying to do that professionally," he said. His works have been displayed at area cafes as well, including the BayLeaf Café in downtown Palo Alto. This is his first Laundromat.

Eril's murals are available for viewing at AJ's Mondays through Saturdays.

Editorial Intern Jamie Schuman can be reached at jschuman@paweekly.com.

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