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REFLECTING LOCAL SPIRIT
Courthouse project artist: ‘When you see this mural, it should feel like Kendall County’ By TONY SCOTT tscott@kendallcountynow.com As visitors to the Kendall County Courthouse in Yorkville pass through the doors, they will soon be greeted by a nine-foot-tall, 40-foot-long mural hand-crafted by a local artist. The mural, painted by Eulojio “Joe” Ortega of Sandwich, will be unveiled at a ceremony at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 4, at the courthouse. The mural will be installed above the security checkpoints in the main lobby. The courthouse will be open that evening until 7 p.m., to give people a chance to observe the mural following the unveiling. The mural is paid for and sponsored by the Kendall Arts Guild, using donations, and Ortega has given the Guild a sizeable discount, according to Guild President Peggy McWethy Sutton of Oswego. “It’s a pretty dignified place, but people go there sometimes, a good percentage of the time, for negative reasons,” Ortega said. “But when it’s Kendall County and you walk in and this is the first thing that greets you, it immediately gives you a positive impression of what the building is about.” Ortega said the mural will be adhesed to the wall similar to wallpaper, and that it will hold “really well.” Ortega has been drawing and interested in art ever since he was young, he said. “I’ve always been drawing,” he said. “A lot of things don’t click, like math and stuff like that, but when it came to drawing stuff or sculpting or anything that had to do with art, it was a pretty easy fit. I went down the road of least resistance.” After graduating from Northern Illinois University with a degree in art in 2001, Ortega took a job at Caterpillar. “I drew a lot when I was at Caterpillar,” he said. “We had to load things into tubs and they’d be shipped off. There was a lot of downtime, sitting around waiting for loads to come in.” The following year, he accepted a job at a large mural company, and after two years he broke away to work on his own. “My first projects were small – residential, kids’ rooms, stuff like that, rich people’s dining rooms,” he said. “Then I got bigger projects, like schools, then I got commercial work, big businesses.” Soon, Ortega was working on large build-
Tony Scott - tscott@shawmedia.com
Mural artist Eulojio “Joe” Ortega of Sandwich is working on a mural that will be installed inside the Kendall County Courthouse in Yorkville. ings out of state, and corporate clients such as Cabela’s. One of his projects was featured on ABC’s “Extreme Makeover.” “But you only saw my hand,” he added. His projects have been getting “bigger and more prestigious,” and he considers this mural project at the courthouse to be a “big deal.” “Kendall County, that’s kind of a big deal; a government building,” he said. Sutton said a mural has been something she has wanted to see at the courthouse. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, to have a nice mural that’s going to last a long time for Kendall County,” she said.
Presiding Judge Timothy McCann said he has partnered with the Kendall Arts Guild in the past, as KAG members have displayed their art at the courthouse. “We have people that spend a lot of idle time here waiting for things, it might be a nice distraction and a healthy thing for everybody, so it was a win-win. It’s worked out extremely well, everybody’s been very happy with that,” he said. McCann said he also wanted to have a mural at the courthouse, but that trying to get funds from the County Board would not have been prudent.
See COURTHOUSE MURAL, page 6
“This mural is going to last long beyond any of us, which brings a sense of history that is kind of beyond what we normally deal with. This will be around for 100 years, long after we’re gone, and that’s very cool.” Judge Timothy J. McCann