Many moons ago, Stephen Gilpin found himself sprinting down New York City streets at night, weaving along sidewalks choked with pedestrians and darting onto the street to avoid oncoming traffic. He was late for a movie, and in Gilpin’s mind that was no reason to call a cab, catch an express train, or just walk a bit faster. It was reason to run.
Once at the theater, Neil Magnuson, a fellow Iolan who had reluctantly trailed a sprinting Gilpin, looked up at him with a crazed expression. “You’re like a wild animal,” Magnuson panted. What in the world was someone like him doing in the city?
YEARS later, Gilpin understands just how much the city grated on him. After graduating from Iola High School, he enrolled at New York’s School of Visual Arts. (Magnuson, a classmate of Gilpin’s, was a student at New York University.) In 1999, Gilpin received a bachelor’s of Fine Arts in illustration. But true to his friend’s word, he never truly felt at home in Manhattan. “Even now,” remarked Gilpin Friday morning, “I don’t feel comfortable even in Midwestern cities.”
Gilpin was addressing a small crowd that had gathered to celebrate the unveiling of his mural at the Lehigh Portland Trail complex. As he stood back and looked back at the design, one couldn’t help but note that the message of the mural seemed to reflect so much of Gilpin’s constitution.
“I start by trying to draw a feeling,” he said. As he worked on a design, he made space for a banner but was still unsure what it would say. As he worked, though, Gilpin reflected on how so much of today’s anxiety, so many of our problems, exist in tiny little screens. What’s the point? What are the gadgets, the phones and watches and tablets, speakers and phones, good for? Why do we keep torturing ourselves?
Get out. And stay out. Gilpin had his message. Really, it’s the same one he’s had for a long, long time. 
THE MURAL is Gilpin’s first in more than 20 years, and it’s sure to leave an impression. The bright and bold colors communicate the beauty and wonder found outdoors, and all the characters–sans perhaps a walking tree and a young man playing the bagpipes while on a unicycle–are all based on experiences Gilpin, an avid user of the Lehigh trail system, has had himself while on the trails. There are also some fun local touches, too, with a boy dressed in Iola’s traditional blue and gold, and a dog that is a spitting image of Gilpin’s own pooch.
His mural, painted along a section of a privacy fence erected between the Madison Avenue pedestrian bridge and State Street, joins one painted by Rodrigo Alvarez and Isaac Tapia of Kansas City. That mural was finished in April 2021. Gilpin intentionally used butterflies, a prominent element in the first mural’s design, to create a feeling of symmetry.
Created with an enamel paint selected thanks to advice from local artist Max Grundy, Gilpin believes “the paint will outlast the fence — that’s the plan at least.”
He had help in the process, as daughter Talulabel Giplin and wife Jennifer Gilpin joined the effort. “Talulabel is very artistic and helped getting the paint on,” said Gilpin. The process from start to finish took about two weeks of solid work, with four to five days spent painting.
GILPIN has worked professionally as an illustrator since 2001 and has received several awards for his work. His design, one of nine entries, was chosen by community members via an online contest sponsored by Thrive Allen County. As with the first mural, funding for his work came from a grant Thrive secured from the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, a division of the Kansas Department of Commerce.
Any future murals will also be funded by grants, so there’s no telling when the next mural will happen. But the vision is clear. “We’ll continue to go after any grant that will help us make these types of projects happen,” said Thrive CEO Lisse Regehr on Friday. “We want this whole fence to be full of murals.”
And in that sense, Gilpin’s message couldn’t fit any better with Thrive’s mission: Get outdoors. And stay out.
