Murals are a unique form of artwork. They are, by definition, large, and painted directly onto a wall, ceiling, or other large, usually flat, surface. They are also one of the oldest forms of art, with some of the earliest cave paintings estimated to be more than 30,000 years old.
Murals, in most cases, are made to tell stories.
Artist Joseph Giannetti, of Roseville, was happy to share his stories during a visit to Tower-Soudan last week. The 86-year-old wanted one last look at one of his most amazing creations— the 60-foot-by- 25-foot mural he painted nearly 25 years ago on one of the immense interior walls of the cavernous MINOS neutrino detector laboratory located a half mile underground in the Soudan Mine.
The mural tells stories, of both physics, the universe, and of things he loves. It’s also a testament to innovation, because the mural is not painted on a flat surface, but rather a bumpy wall of blasted solid rock, coated with concrete. But the image itself, when viewed from a distance, looks perfectly flat.
Giannetti’s love of physics traces back to the early 1970s, when he read an article in Scientific American about sub-atomic particles. That led to more reading, about physics, astrophysics, and the cosmos.
“I became obsessed with understanding the universe,” he said, quoting the lyrics from the Monty Python song that starts:
“Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour that’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned…”
“We are all made of stardust,” he added.
He has made his living as a professional photographer as well as a painter.
He produced a few murals over the years but was dismayed to see his artwork torn down years later.
“I always wanted to do a big one that couldn’t be destroyed,” he said.
Years went by, and then an acquaintance asked him if he’d be interested in doing a mural in an underground iron mine.
He came up to Soudan, but when he saw the surface they wanted painted, he got upset.
“The wall wasn’t flat!” he said, “I didn’t want to do it.”
But he came back home to the Twin Cities and started to ponder the problem.
He solved the problem serendipitously, after placing his eyeglasses down on a table next to a piece of crumpled paper.
He realized the shadows on the crumpled paper resembled the bumpy wall of the mine.
“I saw how I could paint it so it would look flat,” he said. The solution involved creating grids, three- feet square, that could be projected onto the wall, that would guide him during the painting process. It is a technique developed back in the 14th century, he said, developed to paint murals on walls that weren’t quite straight.
The mural was designed to be viewed from a walkway on the opposite side of the cavern, 34 feet up in the air, and right across from the center of the mural.

Mural design
The design of the mural is based on the intersection of mathematics, sub-atomic physics, astrophysics, and life itself. Some of the colors and design elements come from photographs of the Carina Nebula.
“I wanted to create the sensation of things going through you,” he said, like the neutrino particles being studied in the MINOS lab.
The mural is a delight of details. There are hidden words and faces, some connected to physics, and others to his own personal journey.
“People like to say there were dirty pictures in it, but there weren’t.”
There are portraits of famous neutrino physicists, his mother’s face, his grandson, and his daughter’s handwriting. There are words such as always, forever, beginning, metamorphosis, infinity, and change. There are bats, Native American symbols, and miners.
“People ask why I hid these images,” he said. “It was so it wasn’t boring.”
Giannetti said the final design that he was paid to paint is different from his original idea, but he is quite proud of the work he did.
The main ideas for the mural came from the work of theoretical physicist David Bohm and scientist and inventor Itzhak Bentov, whose book “Stalking the Wild Pendulum” is a must-read, Giannetti said.
His work on the mural was interrupted a few months after he started painting when he needed emergency cardiac bypass surgery. But after he recovered, he was back at work, though he did enlist some help from a fellow artist, an airbrush artist who painted both sides of the circular piece, as well as a scientist, who added the thousands of stars on both sides.
The paint for the mural was donated by Sherwin-Williams, he said, and is guaranteed to last 300 years.

Back underground
Soudan mine tour guides Pete Pellinen and Karel Winkelaar arranged a special tour for Giannetti, who came up to Tower-Soudan with two friends.
The MINOS lab space is currently off-limits to visitors, but Winkelaar said they hope to start bringing tours there again once some electrical issues are fixed, possibly sometime next year.
Winkelaar said he learned a lot about the mural during the visit, as well as discovering some of its secrets.
“The most impressive thing I saw,” Winkelaar said, “is that he painted his grandson’s image in the center of the whole mural, in the sun. I’ve been given tours there a long time, but this time it really popped. He said that was his intent. He said 100 years from now, it will really show. His grandson’s image will not fade, but maybe the rest will fade a little.”
Giannetti gave the tour guides a signed print of the mural, which they plan to frame and hang in the park’s hat room.
Gianetti said the trip back underground was quite emotional.
He said he remembered feeling he wasn’t going to be able to complete the mural, after his heart surgery.
“I was going back to see something I was not quite sure I did. I have this habit of doing something that would come out great, but then somehow forgetting how I had done it.”
“I’ve talked to other artists about this feeling,” he said, “and they’ve had the same thing happen.”
The mural is definitely one-of-a-kind.
“I don’t repeat myself,” he said. “Picasso once said the worst thing is to copy yourself.”
When he got down into the MINOS cavern, “it was like I was seeing it for the first time, a very strange sensation.”
“I don’t think anybody understood what I was trying to say with the mural,” he said. “The short version, which I tried to explain to the tour guides, was to represent our advancement as humans….it’s a celebration of being able to understand our origins. The one constant in the universe is change.”

A winding path to art
Giannetti was born in Brooklyn, and spoke only Italian until he was about 7, when his parents were told they needed to start speaking English, not Italian, at home. He had health issues as a child, suffering from severe asthma. At the age of 12, at the advice of doctors, his parents sent him to a boarding school in Arizona.
The change in environment was life-changing, in many ways. “I learned what breathing felt like,” he said. He was also introduced to the study of art.
At boarding school, he had an art teacher, who was also a university instructor, who gave him a strong background in art techniques and color theory. He attended the University of Tucson, majoring in fine art, and found a few more mentors. His free time was spent hanging out with two artists, both of whom were muralists, spending summers working with Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, in Mexico.
He explained that he learned best by watching, while he struggled with verbal instructions.
His actual college education was cut short due to a lack of money. His parents were unable to help, and while someone had given him $1,000, it wasn’t enough to keep him enrolled, even after he took a part-time job as a janitor on campus.
He went back to New York City in 1962, hung out with more artists and photographers, but then was drafted and ended up serving in Korea, stationed in a communications center. “Just like they had in the television show MASH,” he said.
After serving, he returned to New York, but had a “rough time.” I was homeless, he said. “Sometimes I was stealing food.”
He ended up being befriended by a woman in her mid-60s, who when she realized he was hungry, invited him to her home for a meal.
“She took me in and introduced me to the arts [scene]” he said. The woman was a translator, and well connected to the New York art world.
“She knew everybody,” Giannetti said. “And I did fall in love with her.” She gave him his first camera, introduced him to photography, and got him his few first gigs.
But soon, he said, she told him he needed to leave.
“I had started doing photography,” he said, “and I went on to have a career.”
He worked for the Eastman Kodak company, as well as some film production crews. He ended up in the Twin Cities almost by accident back in 1970, since his wife at the time was from Minnesota. The Twin Cities treated him well, offering more work than in New York.
“It was a lot easier to be artistically freer here,” he said.
Giannetti, who is still rather spry and a great storyteller, now lives in a senior apartment in Roseville.
He still paints and sells art, which can be seen online at http://giannetti.com, with both originals and prints for sale.
“I don’t sit still and don’t watch TV,” he said. He paints but has also started doing some digital art.
“I would rather live in Italy,” he said with a laugh. “I think when you die you go to Florence.”