I think there are some people for whom art is this this oceanic force that you can't resist.

That kind of exuberant excess of just making things all day every day.

It's a beautiful impulse.

Okay, good.

What's it like to be Clyde Jones?

Well, it's not being yourself, there's no you can put smiles on your youngins.

The more that I learn about Clyde it seems like that's very true for him.

It seems like he just had to make stuff.

He just had to make stuff and he made so much stuff.

The Clyde Jones mural is a huge field of sky blue and there are creatures all over it.

The mural and I are the same age.

We came into the world in 1996.

It's exciting to think about like what Pittsburgh was like then and what was I doing at that particular time.

This is my first restoration project.

I'm trying to make decisions in the restoration that honor the choices he made originally.

It feels like a real privilege.

It feels like an honor to be able to work on this project that's part of a legacy and part of a heritage.

My name is Thomas.

I've been really lucky to get to know the legacy of people like Clyde Jones who have made Pittsburgh a place of creativity.

I grew up in Vermont.

I moved down here about five years ago and I was on Google Maps all the time and I saw that there was something called the Clyde Jones Critter Crossing in Bynum, North Carolina.

A month or so later I happened to be in the area and I said I should drive by.

It's Clyde's house and he has painted the whole thing with his critters and the whole front yard is filled with these animals, these beautiful animals made out of found objects and wood that he's painted.

If you were to go around the neighborhood here you know you see that pretty much every yard has a critter in it.

As I understand it, it was after a logging accident that crushed his leg.

I had a broken leg with a cast on it.

Seeing nature and woods, walking through the woods, seeing nature and trees and your Jim says I'm freeing him from the wood to nature.

So using his chainsaw and hammers and nails and he started making the critters.

He wanted to bring them to life.

My name is Stephan Myers.

I am an artist, musician and handyman and longtime friend of Clyde Jones.

Many know him simply for the wooden critters but he's been painting for just as long.

Stephan has worked in plaster restoration and so he really understands the kind of care you have to take when you are trying to restore something that was a work of art in its own right.

I have an understanding of substrates and the consolidation and just you know different processes so I made recommendations like that to say hey you know from my experience these are some things that you can try or these are some things you can consider.

I've been working on the restoration project for about four months.

The first thing I did was I put like an isolation layer on the wall so it's a clear coat of polycrylic just to protect the original artwork.

We had no idea that it would lead to this.

We had no idea that we'd be doing a restoration 30 years later.

My name is Lyle and I'm one of the co-owners of the plant and I'm a distiller over at the Fair Game Beverage Company.

Lyle and Tammy Estill were running a company in a building in downtown Pittsburgh.

They had a big blank wall and they wanted Clyde to decorate it.

Tammy and I commissioned Clyde to do a mural on the side of our software business in downtown Pittsburgh.

Clyde was a buddy of mine.

He would come down he said look at this big ugly wall like it's just a big brick wall like why don't you do a mural on it.

I was like we could do that.

I didn't know what I was doing.

I got it primed and ready to go and then whammo Clyde is up on a ladder painting penguins on the wall and there's news crews from all over the state coming to cover it and Clyde Jones famous outsider artist does mural in Pittsburgh.

It is the largest such public work that Clyde has been involved with that still exists.

It faded in the elements and the Sun and it was vandalized and they painted over it.

I thought let's restore that mural and Thomas has been able to go in and actually find the original brushstrokes on that penguin and bring the thing back to life.

This is one of the film photos.

Clyde's paint was so like thick I was able to follow the lines of his paintbrush through these like layers of graffiti and whitewash to sort of pull the original design back into focus which was really exciting.

It's like these creatures were lying dormant for a while and now they get to kind of be out and about again which is really exciting.

I gotta watch the worm myself.

And what's it like having all these people coming in and tramping through your yard all the time?

That's what makes me want to do better.

I think what Clyde finds important about art is how it brings folks together.

A lot of the things that were down on ground level were painted by community members and so you can see a lot of different hands at work.

He was focused on making it clear that art was something for everybody that everybody should be doing.

There's a kind of like improvisatory freedom to it that I think is really alive.

What I'm working on today is a group scene from a photograph that was taken the day the mural was painted.

There's a really wonderful photograph of everybody at the end of the day in front of their work holding up their paint brushes and then a portrait of Clyde on the end.

Today I'm moving on to adding some more dimension and details and giving them a little life.

Thomas is smart and clear and talented and he impressed me.

Hey Thomas.

Nice to see you a lot.

How you doing man?

Good.

The plant was my biodiesel plant.

It was built in '86.

It closed in '96.

We've transformed this place into a food and beverage destination.

You know you come here on a Saturday it's bands and dancing and Thomas walked into the Fair Game Beverage Company one day.

Hi my name is Thomas I want to do a mural at the plant.

And I literally am like do you now?

Like some kid from Vermont it's like well I guess I admired his spunk.

This mural behind me is one that I did.

It's here at the plant which is just a little bit outside of downtown Pittsburgh.

The design was a collaboration with Lyle.

I've been coming to the plant since I moved here.

There's live music, there's a lot of dancing, there's good food, there's good drinks.

I wanted whatever I painted to be sort of an extension of that feeling of like people having fun and dancing together.

I love to dance so I knew I wanted to paint these big dancing figures.

Lyle suggested bugs.

I did a lot of research to figure out what insects would be good dancers and I painted this little music and dance scene.

The way Contra works is you have the band who's providing the music and then you have a caller who's someone on the mic instructing you through the dance.

I have a tendency to be a little shy sometimes but having this very prescribed way of engaging with other people in this way that allowed me to feel really close to them was really exciting for me and I made a lot of wonderful friends.

We've got a guest caller coming up to the stage.

How long do you run the dances for?

Eight or nine minutes.

All right find yourself a partner.

Folks can we get a round of applause for this amazing band playing with fire.

Can you believe this music?

And while you're at it, Terry Doyle, what a caller.

I don't know if y'all can see it but while you folks are dancing, Terry is up here clogging like you would not believe.

I've never seen somebody make noises like that with their feet.

Unbelievable.

I'm very new to calling Contra dances.

I was just hooked.

Balance the ring and California twirl.

Balance the ring and California twirl.

Neighbor balance and swing.

Watching a good caller respond to a mistake, address it, take responsibility and then move on sort of peacefully and joyfully.

It brings an energy that encourages a kind of playfulness and experimentation that's I think really important.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Because so much of making anything, especially making visual art, is you're addressing problems.

You're encountering these roadblocks.

I just remember something amazing which is that I'm really struggling with these with a particular pair of legs but I remembered that the reason that they don't look that good is because there's gonna be somebody in front of those legs which is kind of ideal.

Okay that's huge.

That's huge for me.

You have to kind of move with a kind of lightness that makes it possible to reach the end of a project and enjoy it while you're doing it because if you're not enjoying it like why are you doing it you know?

Particularly with the work this big it's easy to get caught up in little details.

When I was retouching certain areas and I was trying to follow lines very precisely they didn't look as alive as as the mural looked in the original photographs.

There wasn't that kind of exuberance that that explosion of color and all of these creatures against this beautiful blue sky that kind of goes out into infinity.

Instead what I have been trying to do is mimic the process as much as possible.

It feels a lot like handwriting to be able to see like the way people move a brush and it helped a lot in trying to maintain the character.

It looked more like the original painting when I was just like letting the spirit move me as it were.

From what I know of Clyde I think he would he would approve.

Clyde is you know essentially in hospice and I know that Clyde knows that it's underway and I would love to do a ribbon-cutting that Clyde could attend so that he could see his masterpiece living on.

When do you decide to paint?

Just whatever this head says.

That's all I can tell you.

We wanted to celebrate today our iconic legend, the man.

It's his birthday.

Let's all give a hand for Clyde.

It really meant a lot to me that we were able to get this project done and that Clyde was able to be here for its unveiling.

It's exciting in some way to be sort of like collaborating with him across this this time span.

Let's do it.

When we were about to cut the ribbon someone said one of the kids is here.

Wait, a kid from 30 years ago?

No way!

Do you want to say a word?

Say something, please.

My name is Rivers Karagannis and I grew up in Pittsburgh and Clyde has always been one of my heroes.

We were a bunch of kids with all the time in the world just roaming around a small town.

Maybe back to a generation where things were a little bit simpler and you know a can of paint was a big deal.

It still gets me excited right now to think about it.

I painted these beautiful tropical fish.

Ta-da!

Then Elaine was here.

She had brought her daughter.

I painted that funny little eagle that's attacking the dinosaur.

I think it's fabulous to have this in Pittsburgh for people to see.

Hopefully generations to come.

It felt like a real legacy.

Like there was this real unity.

I had a part in this process but Stephan was orchestrating this.

Both Lyle and Tammy were really driving this project forward.

I worked really hard but also I was really welcomed by people who gave me an opportunity to be part of this.

I love having friends who are in different generations.

Folk traditions are ways of kind of bridging social gaps.

Allowing us to address our loneliness in a really powerful way.

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