The artist who painted each of Andalusia’s murals told supporters and contributors at a reception Friday night it has been a blessing to create the work.

Wes Hardin, the Dothan artist who has painted murals all over the nation, has returned from working in Michigan.

“When I walked through the doors tonight, I thought, ‘It feels good to be home.’ ”

Hardin has indeed spent lots of time in Andalusia, where he has taken the concepts developed by a committee and developed them into huge pieces of public art – 11 in all, and is already at work developing a 12th one.

“A lot of the places I work don’t have the infrastructure, the streets, and the unique buildings you have here,” Hardin said. “They usually are looking for a mural to start something. Here it is more like my work is a piece of jewelry added to the equation.”

Hardin said because he does public art in a very public way – with people watching him work, he often has people stop to talk.

“People come to me and start to tell their stories,” he said. “Some are very intimate stories about what they remember. There are not words to put together how much that means. When you do that, you are helping tell the story.”

Asked if he had a favorite among the 11 murals done here, Hardin said he ejoyed “Twilight of an Era,” which portrays the period from 1890 to 1910 when a breed of longhorn cattle from the Andalusia area of Spain was broth to Covington County. The cattle grazed in the pine forest with little disturbance to other inhabitants of the eco-system.

“As an artist, I like the cattle because of some of the things we did differently,” he said. “And the parade mural because of working in the parking lot of the post office and dodging cars.”

Hardin said for an artist, art by committee is generally a horrible idea.

“But this committee is a joy to work with,” he said.

City Clerk John Thompson, who introduced Hardin in the brief program preceding a reception, said credited Murals Committee Chairwoman Pat Palmore and City Councilwoman Hazel Griffin with the idea.

“A number of years ago, Pat Palmore and her husband, A.G., and Hazel Griffin and her husband, Kervin, went on a trip to Chemainus in western Canada, which has a number of murals. When they came back, Mrs. Palmore come and approached the city council about preserving some of Andalusia’s most colorful characters. Then she began to raise the money.

“There is very little public money in the mural projects,” Thompson said. “People have given property, money, stocks, bonds, energy and time to these projects.”

The Murals Committee is a sub-committee of the Tourism and Relocation Committee, chaired by Jewel Curry, which hosted the reception Friday night.