Beverly Willis Fresco

Located at The United Chinese Society Hall
42 N. King Street, Honolulu, Hawaii

By Beverly Willis, FAIA

As the United Chinese Society’s building construction at 42 North King Street in Honolulu neared completion in 1954, the building’s architect, Clifford Young (son of Samuel Kee Young, 1974, Model Father of the Year) asked Jean Charlot to paint a fresco in its reception areas. Charlot at that time had just completed the fresco murals at the University of Hawaii Administration Building – now Bachman Hall – on the second floor. He was unable to accept the United Chinese Society’s (UCS) commission and recommended to the building’s architect that Beverly Willis paint it. She had helped Charlot paint the administration building’s fresco as well as several others. At this time, she had just opened the Willis Atelier (upon her graduation from the University of Hawaii in June 1954) and was very excited about the opportunity to work with the UCS.

She enrolled at the University of Hawaii art school to study Chinese art history and philosophy with Dr. Gustave Ecke, a world-renowned scholar in this field and she graduated with a minor in Far Eastern Art History. Dr. Ecke had lived most his adult life in China. He left China at the beginning of the Maoist revolution to live and teach in Honolulu. The students were told that to facilitate her escape, he married a young Manchu dynasty princess, Tseng Yuho, and together they took up residence in Honolulu. Tseng became a distinguished painter, merging eastern and western techniques in her art.

When Willis was commissioned to paint the fresco, she was asked to memorialize the accomplishments of the Chinese in Hawaii. Traditionally murals have been painted to tell the stories of people and celebrated their accomplishments.

UCS’s 10-feet high and 15-feet wide fresco mural was to commemorate the first three generations of the Chinese people who settled in Hawaii. The Chinese had originally come to Hawaii as laborers to work in the rice and sugar cane fields. Their children became shopkeepers and traders. The third generation attended institutions of higher education becoming doctors, attorneys, architects, business people and politicians.

Following traditional mural practice and to visually communicate the Chinese progress in Hawaii up to 1954, she divided the mural into three vertical sections each symbolizing one of the three generations. Many members of the Chinese Community posed for her sketches, including Hiram Fong, who later became one of Hawaii’s first United State Senators. These sketches were a model for a full-size pencil drawing, called a “cartoon”. On completion of the cartoon, she drew an “outline” onto tracing paper that was then incised into the wet plaster with a blunt metal stylus. Since plaster dries in 4-6 hours, she had to limit the extent of outline to the work that could be fully paint that day, taking care to hide the lines separating each day’s work.

With help from members of the UCS, in the second-generation fresco panel painting of a store’s counter she copied in Chinese a Confucian saying:

“When drinking the water, always remember the source.”

Running below the full width of the 15 feet-wide fresco and in Chinese, she wrote a poem by Wah Chan Thom. The poem was translated by the granddaughter of the Late Wah Chan Thom, Lara Mui Cowell.

Wah-Chan Thom’s 8 line poem at the United Chinese Society Hall translated by Lara Mui Cowell:

It takes a century of achievements to root sturdy trees.
Riding the swift current of progress,
You take leave of your homeland, multiplying your wealth,
Advancing education, and forging alliances.

Taking the humble path, you weave a fine life,
Creating a wellspring of blessings.
Your works, fertile fields from which myriad seeds rise,
Are your legacy bequeathed to posterity.

Jean Charlot taught her to paint in a Buon Fresco technique of painting in pigment mixed with water on wet, fresh, lime mortar plaster. Due to the chemical makeup of the plaster, pigment mixed solely with the water binds the pigment. The wet plaster absorbs the pigment; when the plaster dries, the pigment dries as well, becoming part of the wall surface. This is the same method used by Michaelanglo when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

When she revisited the mural 55 years later - she was 25 when she painted it - The mural looked new – it had not aged like the painter. The transparent colors looked as fresh as the day it was painted in 1954. And she knew as long as it was protected from damage, it would look like new in the 22nd century.