There was a time when I made extra money by airbrushing murals in private homes and at a pediatrician's office. Let's say the client wanted egrets on their bathroom wall. I would start by working out a sketch on an oversized tracing pad in the studio. When I had it the way I wanted it, I brought the page to the wall to be painted, tape it to the wall with the graphite lines facing inward, and "trace" the sketch onto the wall. Then, the fun began.

I had to be extra careful applying frisket to the wall. Frisket is a clear plastic sheeting with a thin layer of adhesive on one side. You apply it to the surface to be airbrushed, gently cut around the area to be sprayed, and lift that part of the frisket off. The remaining frisket masks the area meant to be left untouched.

I had to be take care when cutting the frisket. If I cut through the frisket to the surface of the wall, there was a good chance that the layer of wall paint would come off when I remove the frisket. There was also the possibility of the sprayed paint collecting in the cut lines on the wall, which could lead to splotches.

I learned quickly enough how much pressure to apply to the blade I used to cut the frisket. (It occurred to me that surgeons also have to be aware of how much pressure to apply when operating. How far down into the tissue does a surgeon have to go without damaging the organs underneath?) With experience, you develop a "feel" for this cutting of frisket.

After spraying one unmasked area, I had to wait for it to dry thoroughly, and would often use a small hair dryer to speed things along. Then, I would gingerly re-mask the area and unmask an adjacent area to be sprayed. When removing the re-mask at the end of the session, I had to be careful not to pull off the newly-sprayed paint with it.

One of the illustrations I did in the pediatrician's was the Wizard of Oz. I even put Toto in. No witch, though; kids feel uneasy enough in a doctor's office.

The summer of 1992, I was working with three other people in a very large corporate art room. Davis was our easy-going manager in his forties; Lorna was a quiet and centered grandmother in her mid-fifties.

Jay, in his late forties, was another artist, who stored his collection of neon beer signs, old records, and anything else that he happened to pick up at weekend estate sales in the art room. There certainly was enough space for all of it, and it gave the room the atmosphere of a museum. Asbestos jack-o-lanterns stood on shelves side by side with Chinese lanterns and model trains. There was a six-by-eight foot framed photograph of the train yard outside New York's Penn Station, circa 1934.

The big bosses hardly ever dropped by there; occasionally, one would come in on his way to a meeting somewhere else, sue the phone, and then leave. We could have run a gambling casino or a tattoo parlor in there. I almost raised a kitten in that room.

The walls needed painting desperately. They were blemished with scuffs and dents and the carcasses of dead flies, swatted by the previous tenants of the room. Things were slow that summer, client-wise, so I decided to break out my airbrush and spruce up the place with some murals.

I warmed up with the south wall. I drew an emblem with a right hand holding a Windsor & Newton Series 7 number three red sable watercolor brush. Posed like a cobra ready to strike, the forearm is impossibly curved. Two years later, when that corner of the room was walled off and painted as an office for a manager, he requested that the emblem be spared. He positioned his desk underneath it.

The west wall became a broken battlement with red bricks underneath the wallboard, and blue, clouded sky beyond. That mural was about twenty feet long; I had to walk back and forth on short file cabinets to reach up there. One afternoon, I was going full blast; Davis had to stop me. "There's a cloud in the room!" he told me. It was true. The backsprayed paint had formed a mist in the humidity. I stopped for the day.

When I was finished with the west wall, Jay hung a Molson Beer point-of-purchase balloon in front of it, which added an extra dimension to the illusion.

Over Jay's workspace, I put a window with an eagle flying past a mountain. Below is the mural before I airbrushed the wooden window bracing

This was the most complicated one to do. I worked from the back to the front. Sky first, then the mountain, then the mist. The eagle next - all those feathers had to be individually airbrushed; I sprayed and masked alternate feathers to save time. Then, finally, the window panes and wood.

Between Jay's and Lorna's work stations was a supportive cement pillar. I sprayed stones onto it. Jay hung a cuckoo clock on it to complete the scene. The room felt a little like a ski lodge.

Lorna wanted a window with a scene from the beach. "How about your grandson looking in?" I asked. She liked the idea, so we went with it.

Lorna wanted a window with a scene from the beach. "How about your grandson looking in?" I asked. She liked the idea, so we went with it.

The next time the big boss came in to use the phone, he hardly noticed the murals and said nothing. Eight years later, the room became the home of a programming developing department and the walls were finally given a fresh coat of off-white paint.

Some day, thousands of years from now, archeologists will sift through the rubble of the building and may find some of those murals intact, underneath the peeling paint. What will they make of them? How will their existence be interpreted - or, misinterpreted? As the artist, I will be as anonymous as the prehistoric person who scratched those buffalo paintings on those cave walls in France; I forgot to sign my work.