BR Walls celebrates the blues Wednesday – If you look toward downtown while driving on the Mississippi River Bridge, you might be amazed at what you see.

If you look over toward downtown while driving on the Mississippi River Bridge, you might be amazed at what you see—a 10-story-tall mural of a blues harmonica on the side of a parking garage at the Belle of Baton Rouge Casino, the largest piece of public art in the city.

Muralist Robert Dafford and a small team completed the piece this week. It’s titled “Baton Rouge Blues Harp,” and is the latest from the BR Walls Project, a beautification and economic development non-profit. The mural’s costs were backed completely by Raising Cane’s and Belle of Baton Rouge.

The mural will be unveiled to the public Wednesday at 11 a.m. A celebratory event, dubbed “Harmonizing the Arts,” will take place later at 7 p.m. at the Belle of Baton Rouge (Map it!). The nighttime event features live music from Kenny Acosta, a silent auction and more. Patrons can also sign up to become a member of the Baton Rouge Blues Foundation for $20.

Dafford has painted about 400 murals across the globe, including the New Orleans Clarinet, which spans 15 stories high, and a mural of classic cars in a garage in Lafayette. Dafford says the challenge here was he wanted “to deal with the subject in a way that’s real and communicates the importance to people who live there.”

Dafford also says there were some challenges with the “scale and location” of the mural. He and his team spent hours at a time, suspended on a scaffold working on the mural at heights of up to 80 feet in the air.

“It’s not like anything I’ve ever done before,” he says.

After about 10 days of preparatory work, Dafford, Jason Brake, Chris Fruge and David Alpha began work on the eight-week project.

While working, Dafford says he wanted to recreate “the level of detail that transmits realism at a distance” because it’s most easily viewed from the Mississippi River bridge.

Typically, Dafford says he’s his toughest critic.

“When I’m looking at a work, I’ll say, ‘I didn’t finish that,’ or ‘I could have done a better job on this,'” he says. “Then, I cut myself some slack and say, ‘Is this doing its job?’ I don’t need to have every square inch perfectly finished to some arbitrary degree. I need to know that the balance, harmony and vibration of the piece is right.”

Though Dafford has had many ideas for Baton Rouge murals, the harmonica is his first Capital City piece.

“For 30 years, I’ve wanted to paint in Baton Rouge,” he says. He had proposed around 10 projects in the past, but he says the city wasn’t ready to embrace art and music then as it is doing so now.

“This piece is about big art and music,” he says. “It is about the arts exploding into the open air and being visible, important, being seen and reacted to. In the last few years, I felt like trying to paint here again because I’ve seen that underground blues scene become more above ground and the arts people become more accepted. I’m sure that I will do another mural in time in Baton Rouge.”