Painted by local artist and Clay Cup owner Sarah Garber, the 5-by-50-foot mural depicts Blair County’s beginnings among a network of old Native American trails, its development as a railroad hub and its planned future as the site of a network of recreational trails — Altoona moving from trail town to rail town to trail town again.

Commissioned by the Altoona Blair County Development Corp., which promotes the region as the First Frontier, Garber’s mural is planned to be the first in a series of public artworks designed to accentuate and enhance the continuing rebirth of downtown Altoona — a former bustling city center that once succumbed to suburbanization but has begun to be vibrant again.

Garber’s art itself is a continuation of the art practiced by both her grandmothers: Jean Benn on her mother’s side is a watercolorist; while the late Mardell Garber on her father’s side painted billboards for Penn Advertising, devised the logo on the New Look Uniform & Embroidery building near the southern split of Valley View and Pleasant Valley Boulevard and created murals still visible in First Church of Christ and the Bellwood Antis Public Library.

ABCD worked with Garber on the basic themes, then gave her “full scope” to execute the project as she saw fit, according to Steve McKnight, CEO of the Blair Alliance for Business & Economic Growth, which now includes ABCD.

Artist Sarah Garber’s mural is at 1510 11th Ave. A predominant motif for the mural was light, according to Garber. Mirror photo by Patrick Waksmunski

“(ABCD) gave me an abundance of creative freedom” to create art that “represents the past, present and future,” Garber said in a speech to about 40 people gathered at Levity Brewing Co. on 11th Avenue for the dedication, which was held indoors due to rain.

A predominant motif for the mural was light, according to Garber.

Its treatment in the work includes light flowing from an enormous flashlight on the left side, designed to represent Garber’s attempt to enlighten viewers to the area’s history — a history that proceeds, as on a written document, from left to right.

Its treatment also includes successively vibrant color for the buildings in a downtown scene, starting with black-and-white on the left and ending with a full palette of colors on the right — a transition designed to represent the move from the old days to the current downtown revival.

The mural is designed to work on separate levels, depending on how far away it is viewed.

There are bold elements, including the flashlight, the downtown buildings and the outline of the mountains, that are designed to be “digestible” to people in cars going by on 11th Avenue.

There are recessive elements, including the trails on the mountains, the streams among the mountains and the silhouettes of people walking on the trails and kayaking on the streams, that are designed to be recognized only when viewers are close enough to distinguish such details.

She achieved the recessive character of those components by painting them in colors that only lightly contrast with their backgrounds.

Making them bold, like the more prominent elements, would have rendered the entire scene too “busy,” she said.

Gradations of color depict the terrain: with vibrant green in the foreground that gives way step-by-step through ranks of mountains via greens that shade into blue of more distant mountains then into the blue of the sky.

That reflects the actual shifting colors of the local mountains, that, as they are farther and farther from the viewer, partake more and more of the color of the sky, Garber said.

Her interest in light and in the mountains reflects an interest of her late father, who would often observe how beautiful those mountains are, she said.

Since he died 10 years ago, she has studied how the colors of those mountains change day by day and within each day.

The dedication event recognized three donors that covered the $10,000 project cost, including expenses: Dede Kazmaier, Ann Benzel and the Central Pennsylvania Community Foundation.

There was also Pennsy Properties, whose owners “let me go to town on the side of their building, literally and figuratively,” Garber said.

“You can see that a project like this takes the whole community,” Garber said. “It’s an absolute honor to leave a permanent creative mark,” she added, citing a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount, as told in the Gospel of Matthew: “You are the light of the world.”

She ended her speech with an aside to McKnight: “Where am I painting next summer?”

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.