Growing up the daughter of missionaries, Betni Kalk spent a lot of time outdoors surrounded by nature. It’s only natural that as an artist she draws a lot of inspiration from the world around her.
“We were in Papua New Guinea,” Kalk told The Nonpareil in an interview. “I spent most of my childhood in the jungle. That’s where we hung out, that’s where we played. I did a lot of exploration.”
Kalk spent a lot of time admiring the local artwork she would see while accompanying her parents around the region.
“The art that I grew up around was from the Sepik region,” Kalk said. “That’s where we were most of the time. It’s pretty specific to that area. When you see it, you can usually tell if you’re familiar with it, a lot of carving, a lot of pattern, and most of those things in some way or another came from nature. I noticed as I was growing up, I’d spot stuff that looked like what they were doing to be like on beetles or inside of ferns, things like that.”
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Her exposure growing up to so much art on public display, for everyone to see, left an impression on Kalk, one that still influences her to this day.
“There was also a ton of public art,” Kalk said. “Like, when you made something, everybody saw it. I really loved the public art when I was growing up. I remember that on the coast, where we would go to get supplies, there was this massive crocodile that you could walk through and a lot of the spirit houses there are just pieces of art on the outside.”
A Papua New Guinea spirit house, or haus tambaran, is a house of worship and meeting place where the men of the village perform rituals and initiations.
Kalk, whose family returned to the United States when she was 13, studied street art in graduate school in Minnesota. While she personally would not paint on someone else’s property without permission, she liked the idea of her art being more accessible to more people if it was outdoors.
“I realized more and more that the more I showed in galleries only a very small segment of the population will ever see that work, let alone buy it,” she said. “So I really like the idea of it being outside. And I do some interior murals as well, but I like the idea of people finding them outside. A lot of travel that I’ve done over the years, I really appreciated the street art that was available for people to see, whether it was, you know, sanctioned or not.”
When she was in grad school, Kalk decided that she wanted to paint murals. She applied for grants to fund her work, and when she would see a wall that looked ripe for a mural, she would ask the property owner if she could paint their wall.
“I would go to people and say, ‘I really like the wall that you have, could I do a mural for you? If you don’t like it in three months, I’ll paint it over,’” Kalk said. “And so people basically could get a free mural.”
In 2013, after grad school, Kalk moved to Omaha to take a job teaching graphic design at Creighton University while contining to refine her art.
As a professional artist, Kalk’s style varies depending on the project — whether it’s a realistic landscape or something more abstract — but “all of it is anchored in nature in some way,” she said.
“One of my favorite places to be is just hiking through the woods, even now,” she said. “I have a really deep appreciation of how it makes me feel, which is always good, like my happy place.”
With its focus on nature, Kalk’s artwork was ideal to adorn the First Avenue trail-facing wall of Honest Auto Repair at 15½ S. 20th St.
“(The property owner) really liked the landscapes that I did,” Kalk said. “He wasn’t too much more specific than that, other than he wanted some connection to the building.”
The auto repair shop was once a railcar repair station, “so (the property owner) wanted something with a train in it,” Kalk said. “And then he wanted a car there.”
Ultimately, Kalk’s mural, titled “Rails to Trails: Evolution of Transportation,” would encompass the history of transportation along that First Avenue corridor, with everything from bicycles and horse-drawn buggies through the industrial revolution of locomotives and automobiles.
Kalk added a person walking a dog and a child riding a scooter to symbolize the trail’s current uses.
“I went around and I photographed a lot of the different Loess Hills from different parts of the road and then just kind of started figuring it out,” Kalk said.
Once the design was settled, Kalk and her partner, Weston Thomson, who is another of the First Avenue mural artists, got to work prepping the brick wall for the paint.
“The building is really old, so it had to be cleaned first and then we primed it multiple times,” Kalk said. “Trying to stick something on there is very difficult, on old brick, so the process of priming was a bit of a nightmare. It was just a really long process to prime it, probably more than anything.”
Once the bricks were ready, Kalk set up a projector to project her design on the wall and they got to work.
“I did as much of it as I could with, I used small hand sprayers, not spray paint, I don’t trust the longevity quite as much as others do,” Kalk said. “So I used a sprayer, so, like, the sky I could spray, a lot of the clouds I could spray. I still had to hand paint quite a bit of the sky, but you know, where I could I did that and then most of the rest of it’s by hand, just with the brush.”
From design to finished mural, Kalk said the project took about two months to complete. She wasn’t able to get started until September, and then it was a race against the clock to get it finished before it got too cold.
“You can’t paint under 50 degrees,” Kalk said. “It won’t stick. Or, there’s no guarantee that it’ll stick.”
Kalk’s use of bright colors was purposeful, “because, you know, around this time of year you kind of need it. I wanted it to be that spot where it’s like, ‘oh yeah, that’s coming back, it’ll be OK, just a couple more months.’”
She hopes that passersby will use her mural as a backdrop for selfies or family photos.
For more information about the First Avenue murals, visit tinyurl.com/firstavemurals. More examples of Kalk’s artwork can be seen at b-e-t-n-i.com.