SPRINGFIELD — Ask how he decided what his latest wall mural would be and Wane COD is stumped at first. To him it’s obvious. It doesn’t need a lot of explanation.
“The design is ‘Hope is Welcome,’” he said. “It just means they give everyone a second chance, they turn no one away, so that’s the premise of the whole concept.”
And so, across 60 or 70 feet of exterior wall at Springfield’s Friends of the Homeless campus on Worthington Street, “Hope is Welcome” started taking shape Saturday in bold typography and bright colors.
Wane COD is the name the mural’s creator makes his art under. COD stands for “create or die.”
He worked with groups of people Saturday to bring his vision to life. Some workers were staff members at Friends of the Homeless, some were residents of the program and some were area citizens who came out to help out. The mural should be complete by the end of October.
The project’s patron, Karin Jeffers, president and CEO of Clinical & Support Options, said the mural serves many purposes.
“It is nice to see something beautiful and inspiring every day rather than a plain, beige wall,” she said. “We want to foster hope among those people we serve, and this mural will provide a visual reminder of that.”
Clinical & Support Options, a nonprofit agency in Northampton, operates the Friends of the Homeless facility in Springfield and 16 others across five counties.
More than simply brightening up the place, the mural and its message serve to support the agency’s clinical work. The Friends of the Homeless shelter in Springfield is one of the few such facilities in the state providing integrated behavioral treatment and addiction services on site.
“We not only wanted to provide a more appealing and comfortable place to stay for individuals experiencing homelessness, but we wanted to help support the clinical work we do for our guests,” Jeffers said.
“Hope is Welcome” is the overriding message of the mural, but Wane said he has included reinforcing messages just as important: trust, faith, choice and peace. They show up not in bright, bold colors but muted, almost subliminal notes. Many of those messages came directly from the people at the shelter.
“There are certain iconic symbols, things like the praying hands, the peace symbol, flowers. They are in the background tonally, almost fading away,” Wane said. “They are a lot of messages behind the big one. When people are staying here every day and they can look at these messages and maybe get inspired to move on with their lives. That’s coming from the people who live here, who are living the experience and going through it.”
The Friends of the Homeless campus is Wane COD’s second wall mural in Springfield. He completed a mural at the Columbus Center parking garage earlier this year for the Fresh Paint Springfield project under the direction of Britt Ruhe.
Wane grew up on the Bronx in the 1980s. He’ll tell you his first canvases were subway trains. If they would stop long enough, he would paint them.
His talent steered him away from what for many has been a one-way path to addition or crime.
“It was all around me and the temptation was high,” he said of his early life. “A lot of the kids I hung out with and painted with went that way.”
For whatever reason, the art compelled Wane and his friends recognized that and left him alone.
“They respected me,” he said. “They didn’t try to get me into the drugs and stuff.”
Now he is a recognized street artist, graphic designer and painter of commissioned murals.