Thirty years ago, in 1994, “Lion King” taught people to have “Hakuna Matata,” while “Forrest Gump” broke box-office records. Former President Richard M. Nixon died, as did Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, OJ Simpson led police on a high-speed chase via his white Bronco, and Northridge suffered a 6.7-scale earthquake. Plus, artist Alfred Young gathered a diversity of Pacific Grove residents, 110 subjects, to be exact, for the purpose of creating an expansive community mural. The purpose behind his Pagrovian portraiture was to foster the preservation of local culture.

While Young, now 88, resides in San Francisco, the 237-foot, freeze-frame mural, believed to be the world’s largest group portrait created by a single artist, is preserved under the auspices of the Monterey Museum of Art.

“My work was achieved by using a technique called ‘Contact Drawing,’ for which each subject would stand on one side of a transparent screen, and I would draw them on the other side. I repeated the process several times per person,” said Young, “and then I superimposed the images, creating a lively rather than stiff or static portrayal.”

Seeking an opportunity to display such an expansive mural in one setting, Young was granted permission by Julie Work Beck to display the piece, in full, within her vacant Sprouse- Reitz dime-store building on Lighthouse Avenue.

“I remember when Alfred did the painting and displayed it in our building,” said Beck. “The site, where ‘Vintage Vines’ is now, is such a large space. To have that big a vacancy in the heart of downtown was hard, so it was a good thing to let various organizations in the community use it for their needs.”

Determined to draw

Born in London in 1936, Young’s growing-up years were largely defined by the various places to which he was evacuated and the experience of rarely seeing his parents until the war’s end, in 1945. By then, he was 9 years old and already interested in art. Yet few blue-collar folks trying to dig themselves out of the paucity of the war years were interested in art. Except, perhaps, the art of post-war recovery. Still, he drew, but his talent was considered a quirk by family and friends.

Yet, when Young was 13, he attended a vocational school for printmaking where, by 15, he had become an apprentice, an experience he quickly understood, could become the grounding force for an artist. He was 21 when he completed his apprenticeship and became a student at the London School of Printing — now the London College of Communication, a constituent of the University of the Arts London — where he was introduced to the colorful, prismatic works of cubist Jaques Villon. This led to an intrigue with “additive color,” a process that involves the addition of primary colors to varying degrees to reach an unusual but predictable color outcome.

Following a yearlong intensive, Young enrolled at the Royal College of Art where he continued painting as a postgraduate student. Three years after he became an art teacher at the Kingston School of Art — now Kingston University, Alfred Young came to the United States to teach art at the University of New Mexico. In 1968, the artist began teaching at San Francisco State University, where he connected with two other teachers with whom he began creating large-scale artworks for the City.

“Using chartreuse dye,” he said, “we wrote the word OIL in the San Francisco Bay, next to the Chevron Refinery. An oil spill there the following year killed thousands of shorebirds. We also created an installation called ‘Yellow Cabs,’ which involved bringing a hundred cabs to Castro and Market streets. The curator at the Berkeley Art Museum said this was the beginning of Flash Mobs.”

In 1980, Young discovered Contact Drawing, a technique for which various artists have been credited when he realized he could stretch transparent fabric over a subject and draw the figure directly on the fabric with chalk. After repeating the process, he superimposed his drawings, creating a kind of composite figure for each of the 110 subjects he later portrayed in “Painting the Town.”

“The mural shows various city officials,” said Young, “including the mayor, entertainers, construction workers, a dentist and a pharmacist, a radio personality and a soap star, police officers and firemen, a screenwriter and a physicist, moms and children, special Olympic medalists, newlyweds and a couple celebrating 50 years of marriage, plus a newborn and the aged. All came together to view the work when it was exhibited.”

Today, says Young the mural is a time capsule, reminding him of a period just before we began to grapple with computers, and the Internet had not yet invaded our lives to any great extent.

“More importantly,” he said, “the mural depicts community members who are no longer with us yet whose presence, once again, if only briefly, we feel. Even though they don’t have the space to display the mural, It seemed natural that Monterey Museum should have it. I liked to imagine relatives of those depicted looking at it now. The little baby in one section is now 30 years old.”