From 1969 onwards, a panoramic Millard Sheets mural marked the entry to the Santa Monica Home Savings branch. “Pleasures Along the Beach” is the name. The mural depicts the sunset, the ocean, sailboats, sunbathers, blankets, people playing with a beach ball, birds in flight.
Those pleasures remain, but “Pleasures Along the Beach” does not. The mural was removed from the building in 2019 and put in storage. (“No more ‘Pleasures Along the Beach’ ” was the headline of the Santa Monica Lookout story.)
Now, the mural has been unearthed and repaired at a locale far from the beach: Claremont. That’s in preparation for its final destination in Orange.
I caught the tail end of the work on Wednesday at the former Candlelight Pavilion dinner theater, originally Claremont High’s theater. Brian Worley, a Claremont artist, was overseeing it.
On the carpeted floor of the theater, the mural — in 570 jagged sections — was pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Ample floor space was a necessity: The mural’s dimensions are 16 feet high and 41 feet long. That’s almost the distance between a basketball backboard and the half-court line.
“I needed a huge laydown space,” Worley told me. “It was wonderful that I was able to have use of the building.”
For Worley, this is more than another conservation project. The artist, 73, worked for Sheets, the prolific watercolorist, architectural designer and arts impresario who died in 1989. The Sheets studio was on Foothill Boulevard in Claremont, just blocks east of the theater.
Worley worked on what he said were “easily, 50” of the 200-some Home Savings buildings that Sheets designed.
In fact, he even did some of the background details on “Pleasures Along the Beach.”
“I was a student at Pomona College. My aunt, Nancy Colbath, was running the studio. I would do work for pocket change,” Worley said. “I worked the summer there between my junior and senior years.”
Four years later,…
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