Pax River museum restores space mural

It wasn’t the shading, or mixing the colors, or the facial reproductions, or the attention to detail that was the hardest part of painting the 1986 mural that now hangs in the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum.

Not by a long shot.

“It was climbing up and down that scaffolding every day,” George McWilliams said of the three months he spent painting the 22-by-25-foot mural, originally created at the Officer’s Club at Naval Air Station Patuxent River.

The mural, which went through a state of disrepair after the Officer’s Club closed, was recently restored and raised to the rafters of the Lexington Park-based museum.

“It’s going to blow you away anytime you have your work professionally installed and restored,” McWilliams said.

A ceremony was held May 31 to commemorate the restored mural, which depicts 25 years of naval aviation in space.

“It’s fantastic,” George Hill, president of the museum's board of directors, said. “It’s taken us five years to get here.”

The 65-year-old McWilliams, who is now retired and lives in Palestine, W.V., literally saw his mural for the first time in a new light recently.

“I think they did a fantastic job,” he said. “In all honesty the lighting in the Officer’s Club was so bad that the first time I saw it that night was the first time I’d seen it in vivid color because it was lit so well.”

McWilliams was working at the Technical Information Department at Naval Air Station Patuxent River when he was requested by his boss and then-Admiral Jack Ready to paint a mural on 25 years of naval aviation in space and major achievements in the space program.

“I said, ‘Yes,” even though I wasn’t sure if it would be really good or not,” he said. “[But] it was definitely something I wanted to do.”

To get faces and equipment correct in the pre-internet days, McWilliams went to NASA headquarters and pored through images.

Curiously, McWilliams was working on a shuttle portion of the painting on Jan. 28, 1986, when he learned of the explosion onboard the space Shuttle Challenger that killed all seven crew members.

“It was a little weird,” he said. “It’s not what you’d expect.”

The mural hung in the Officer’s Club until it closed down and the lack of air conditioning along with the elements took its toll. A treatment report listed mold and dampness, and Hill said the mural was “not in terrific condition at that time.”

It was put in a tube to help preserve it and sat at the museum for the next two years. Hill said, “We were worried how long it could stay like that.”

The restoration took five years and cost between $130,000 and $150,000.

A virtual reality presentation was put together to show where the mural would look best and the mural was later affixed high above the same exhibit that holds a moon rock mounted on six aluminum honeycomb panels, and attached to steel girders with 240 screws.

The mural has been accepted into the Naval Air Station Pensacola archives and is on permanent loan — as are many of the museum’s aircraft — at the museum in Lexington Park.

“It’s the biggest of the paintings, or pieces of art, in terms of historic pieces of art we’ve collected at the museum,” Hill said. “It’s about Pax River.”