Flying high again: Col. Lambert mural being repainted by Ironton artist Shawn Kelley

By Mark Shaffer
The Ironton Tribune

The Col. William “Bill” Carpenter Lambert mural is currently undergoing a face lift.
Artist Sean Kelley of Ironton is spending his weekends and free time from work repainting and revitalizing it.
On Friday afternoon, he was spraying a very vivid red and orange onto the mural to create a field of poppies in the lower left corner of the mural.
“I’m going to tone that down with house paint,” he explained. “It just needs a good base color.”
He likes to get the structure of the mural done with spray paint and then he likes to go in and flesh it out with exterior house paint, a combination of stain paint and then gloss paint, so it shimmers in the sunlight. The house paint is used so the colors remain vivid for a long time and he will apply a sealant so it doesn’t fade.
Kelley has already done two murals on the Ironton Floodwall; one was repainting the Ironton Tanks mural and the first was an original work of a stylized moth with lotus flowers around it. He is a 2004 Ironton High School graduate and has received a bachelor’s degree in painting from Ohio University.
Mural work is not Kelley’s usual artistic medium. The artist usually works in a smaller scale.
“My medium of choice is linoleum printmaking,” he said. “I have a bachelor’s in painting but I hung out with the printmakers in college; I identified with them more.”
He started painting murals about three years ago with the moth mural and then repainted the Ironton Tanks mural out of his own pocket at no expense to the city.
He said it has been slow as far as mural work goes, at first because he doesn’t advertise his services. But after he did a mural on Granny’s in Ironton, he got more work including the mural he recently did on Lulu’s Smoke Shop.
“I didn’t have a plan for it; I just did it spontaneously out of my head,” Kelley said.
Those works brought him to the attention of the William C. Lambert Military Museum and Archive, which hired him to update the mural of Ironton’s most famous aviator.
“I don’t mind updating murals, but I am at least going to put my own spin on it,” Kelley said. “I am going to pay homage to it.”
He said it will probably take three or four weeks to complete the project since he has to balance working on the mural with working his full-time job as a rad tech at the former atomic plant in Piketon.
“I enjoy doing murals and challenging myself and get better and better” Kelley said.
He motioned to the sky on the mural, which features Lambert’s Royal Air Force plane shooting down a German plane.
“These clouds are going to be insane when I’m done. There is going to be a sun and rays are going to shoot out,” he explained. “Instead of dreary, I wanted to have a little bit of vibrancy to it. It is going to stay pretty much the same; the colors are just going to pop a little more.”
The Lambert mural includes a picture of him in his dress uniform.
“I wanted to really push the realism with his portrait,” Kelley said. “I’m not done with it yet.”
Lambert left Ironton to join the British Royal Flying Corps in 1917. He eventually registered 18 air-to-air victories in 1918.
Lambert received a Distinguished Flying Cross awarded to Royal Air Force pilots who showed acts of valor while engaging the enemy.
He is believed to be the second-ranked Ace pilot of World War I, only eight victories behind fellow Ohioan pilot Eddie Rickenbacker.

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