Asbury Park Zest The Rainbow Issue Summer 2015 | Page 21

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ART I ST S POT L IG HT

PORKCHOP
Viva la femme!

Y

ears ago, Mike La Vallee painted
pictures of pork chops as a sign of
temptation. Eventually it evolved
into a logo of his work, and his trade name.
“A good friend of mine started calling me
'Pork Chop' and the name stuck,” says La
Vallee, who recently spent more than a year
masterminding his second Asbury Park “lady”
mural. He came up with “Jelly Lady” to complement “Octo Lady” created in 2010. Both
now adorn the interior breezeway in the old
Casino buildingon the southend of the Asbury
Park Boardwalk.
If you see the mural at the Casino you may
be surprised that she’s not a mermaid. “Mermaids are played out,” La Vallee asserts. He is
one of the artists cherry-picked from all over
the world by boardwalk redeveloper Madison
Marquette to lend their time and talent to the
Asbury Park experience.
Rest assured, Pork Chop is neither novice
nor hack. His mission for years has been to
beautify Asbury Park, while celebrating and
preserving the city’s rich history.

La Vallee, a sculptor and painter, got his
master’s degree in sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University. Although he grew up in
Smithtown, Long Island, he frequented Asbury
Park since the ‘90s before settling here permanently in 2001.
The 80-foot-wide “Jelly Lady” is a massive
display of femininity and color framed by the
Casino building’s beaux-arts architecture of
the 1900s. It’s fortunate that La Vallee’s greeting from Asbury Park was a sort of graveyard
of broken dreams. “Eighteen years ago Asbury
Park seemed like a forgotten place,” he recalls.
“There was beauty in its abandonment that I
was drawn to.”
To the eye of an artist, ‘that forgotten look’
represented a blank slate for what it could
become. That’s why “Octo Lady” was part
flapper, part octopus – to symbolize the city’s
glorious peak in the ‘20s. That’s when New
York architect Whitney Warren designed the
Paramount Theatre and Convention Hall, the
Casino Area and Carousel House as well as the
Berkeley-Carteret Hotel.
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