Tim Fields Dies; Muralist Worked With L.A. Youths

Tim Fields, a Los Angeles artist who worked with schoolchildren to create 53 murals around the city, has died. He was 35 and died March 9 at his home of a respiratory infection.

Fields became known as the “Boulevard Da Vinci” for a series of celebrity-oriented murals he painted along Hollywood Boulevard in the late 1980s.

He worked occasionally as an actor and caricaturist, but said his greatest satisfaction came from producing murals with children and teenagers.

A graduate of Illinois State University, Fields worked with many troubled youths and believed in the redeeming value of art.

“Young people just need a chance, some understanding and something to take pride in,” he said in an interview last year.

Fields arrived in Los Angeles from his native Chicago in 1986. He organized his first group mural project in 1991 at the Los Angeles Youth Network, a shelter for teenage runaways in Hollywood. Other murals followed at the Challengers’ Boys and Girls Club in South-Central L.A., the North Hollywood Valley Community Clinic and the Ramona Gardens housing project in East Los Angeles.

Two years ago, he led a battalion of teenagers from the Halcyon Center in North Hollywood to transform a two-mile stretch of Vineland Avenue that was marred by graffiti and quake-cracked storefronts.

Many of the “volunteers” were North Hollywood teenagers who had been sentenced to community service in connection with drug or robbery cases.

They took a wall at Denny Avenue and turned it into a “Corner of Paradise” with a rain forest theme. At Oxnard Street, they painted scenes of the San Fernando Valley’s rural past, showing chickens pecking gravel. Down by Burbank Boulevard, they created an abstract work in the style of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, using squares of teal, mustard yellow and rust paint.

“The youth in the community are actually changing the community itself, which helps keep the murals free of graffiti,” Fields said during the Vineland Avenue project. “There’s a street aesthetic toward art where murals get respect. By involving the kids in the community, it’s also their own work, it’s their pride.”

Gloria Gold, who runs the Halcyon Center, said Fields was a warm and comical figure with a mass of curly blond hair who usually wore the paint-spattered rags of his trade. She said he had a knack for communicating with children, many of whom were as young as 5.

Most of his youthful volunteers had no opportunity for art training at school or at home, so Fields would begin by talking about how to create the impression of light and shadow, and how to hold a paintbrush.

“He gave them lessons in art and art theory, so these youngsters who may never have had any art instruction at all were able to participate in making a work of art that was permanent and be proud of it,” Gold said Monday.

According to Gold, who worked with Fields on six murals in the San Fernando Valley, Fields often told the children that he became an artist by copying characters from comic books. “He would say, ‘I copied them over and over again, and if you really want to, you can do it too.’ He was a wonderful inspiration.”

Fields was honored recently by the Hollywood Arts Council for the dozens of murals he painted with schoolchildren around the city.

He is survived by his father, William Fields of Kentucky, and his mother, Madelen Fields-Gollogly, stepfather John Gollogly, brothers Daniel and Joey, and sister Becky Scott Steuer, all of Chicago.

A memorial service is planned in April in Los Angeles.