WALL COMES TO LIFE

A bright, colorful and beautiful river scene with a large turtle, a butterfly, Ralph the famous swimming pig in a tube, a helpful armadillo picking up trash, a fishing squirrel and a heron now adds one more spark of visual interest to a building downtown.

The new mural located at the intersection of 313 E. Hutchison Street on the Minuteman Press Building was birthed from a partnership between local artist Rene Perez and Texas Disposal Systems.

TDS Senior Marketing Communications Specialist Katy Fordyce had a hand in the creation of this project along with the city of San Marcos Arts Commission.

“Since 2020, the start of the pandemic, TDS started doing an art initiative where we worked with different artists to create, at the time, coloring pages so that families, when they’re staying at home, could print out coloring pages and color it together,” Fordyce said. “This year we wanted to bring that illustration to life, so we wanted to commission a local San Marcos artist Rene Perez to create an illustration that would then become a full blown mural.”

TDS is not new to the community.

“We’ve been servicing San Marcos since 2003. We do single stream recycling, composting and waste collection. We wanted to bring the beauty as well as our love for sustainability to the city of San Marcos,” Fordyce said.

The plan for the mural began when TDS decided to reach out to Perez a month ago, asking him to create the mural.

“They just wanted me to paint something Earth Day-inspired. They said just paint something beautiful. They were really cool about letting me kind of do whatever,” Perez said.

TDS wanted a mural that represented San Marcos, but did not feel they needed to micromanage Perez’s creation.

“We really just wanted to bring the beauty of San Marcos nature to the mural, as well as some nods to recycling and keeping the earth green and keeping things clean,” Fordyce said. Perez pointed out that TDS cleans up the environment, so that is why he added the animals doing the same in his mural. “It's also what I want people to do too. If you see some trash pick it up,” Perez said. “The animals are always watching when you do that, even if you’re the only person in the river.”

According to Perez, the mural only took him six days to complete. “I started this last week,” Perez said. Perez pointed to a 2 by 1 foot replica of the mural that was sitting on a table nearby. “It almost takes about the same amount of time to paint this as it does that. It’s just a bigger brush,” he said. Perez started painting when his son was born, 16 years ago. “2009 was my first art show. I started painting San Marcos scenes and animals, and people started responding to that. The murals came about around six years ago,” Perez said. He frequents the river, and that is where he gets a lot of his inspiration, along with his cats. “Rene is very well known around the city ... so we thought what better way to do a nod to the community than using someone who is known and loved,” Fordyce said.