Painter’s Masterpiece Is Library’s Mural

In the early 1950s, Danish-born artist Kay (rhymes with sky) Nielsen spent two years on scaffolding in the library of Sutter Middle School, restoring and extending his masterpiece.

Called “The First Spring,” the enormous mural is still housed in the Canoga Park school, a little-known treasure threatened by the Valley’s punishing climate and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s lack of funds.

More than 30 feet wide and 20 feet high, the painting is Nielsen’s vision of the first days of the world, inspired by the Book of Genesis and Haydn’s “The Creation.” It includes portraits of more than 200 species of living things, including a whale, a white horse and a ladybug.

Former Sutter librarian Lee Gibbons watched as Nielsen worked, often pulling every picture she could find of the beast being painted. Like Da Vinci, Nielsen mixed his colors in an egg-white base and approached his work with obsessive care.

“He worked for a week on a nickel-sized water buffalo,” Gibbons recalled.

A rite of passage at the school is finding the four-leaf clover painted at a young viewer’s request.

Nielsen’s painter wife, Ulla, drove him to the school every day, made the soup he liked for lunch and handled the rest of his affairs. He occasionally allowed her to paint grass, but never the animals.

Born in 1886, Nielsen won acclaim as illustrator of such classic children’s books as “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (1914) and “Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales” (1924). He came to L.A. in the ‘30s to design a Hollywood Bowl production of “Everyman.”

For a short time, Nielsen worked at Disney, earning an art director credit for his contribution to the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in “Fantasia” (1940).

“The First Spring” was a commission, but those were few and far between. Nielsen was barely able to support himself as an artist and even tried illustrating greeting cards. He died, impoverished, in 1957.

Ironically, Nielsen got a final film credit more than 30 years after his death.

While at Disney, Nielsen did some haunting pastel sketches on black paper for a version of “The Little Mermaid” that was never produced. Found in the files, the work inspired new artists and earned Nielsen a credit on Disney’s 1989 hit, “The Little Mermaid.”