About the Mural

The Tesla mural is found at 2232 5th Avenue South. This work by St. Petersburg artist Carrie Jadus is inspired by Nikola Tesla, and titled “Resonance.”

The mural faces the intersection of 22nd Street South and 5th Avenue South. The Pinellas Trail cuts through the intersection at an angle, and passes the mural’s left side. The Tesla mural takes up the entire northeast wall, 78 feet wide and 30 feet high.

It’s a striking, sepia-toned portrait of scientist Nikola Tesla, debonair and dashing, with a dark moustache, wavy hair, hazel eyes and the good looks of a silent film star. He’s painted from his shoulders up, his face so large that the top of his hair is cut off by the roof. His eyes look directly at you – observant, and slightly amused. His cocky eyebrows and almost-smile makes it clear that he is measuring and calculating what he sees – but in a moment, he might break into a laugh.

Tesla wears an old-fashioned suit with an open, high collar and holds an enormous reflective sphere in his right hand, balanced on his fingertips. His fingers are alive and expressive, and reflected at the bottom of the sphere. The sphere reflects the intersection that the mural faces, with a white car, a bicycle crossing the street and in the distance, a cell phone tower and Tropicana Field. Tesla’s face is reflected in the globe.

The mural is in the browns and golds of an old photograph. But the shadow of the globe and the shadow cast by Tesla’s wavy hair are a muted greenish-blue, as is the light reflecting from the globe onto his shoulder.

A rust-colored metal stairway zig-zags up the wall to the left of Tesla, heading to a grey door on the third floor with a turbine engine painted above it. A high window with metal bars juts out of Tesla’s forehead, between his right eye and his ear. Its sides are painted the same shade of greenish-blue.

Artist Carrie Jadus often paints large-scale “Grande Portraits” at least five feet high. She chooses geniuses, musicians and other people she finds inspirational. Before she became a full-time artist, Carrie earned a degree in electrical engineering and worked as a radio frequency design engineer.

Nikola Tesla is a Serbian inventor and physicist whose work in the late 1800s profoundly affected radio broadcasting, modern engineering and communications. He designed the light bulb and alternating current, or AC power. Many of his theories were so far ahead of his time that he was dismissed as a quack – and much of Tesla’s work is only now coming to fruition, like wireless communication.

Tesla experienced “Blocks of Thoughts,” that let him imagine experiments and run variations in his mind until they were successful, before he would actually perform the experiment.

The window jutting out of Tesla’s forehead is one of these Blocks of Thoughts, as are other windows in the upper left and right corners of the wall, and two square air conditioning units on the lower left.

Jadus designed the mural so the windows of the building represent blocks of floating ideas, adding blocks of abstract gold and silver light bulbs powered by AC electricity. Thomas Edison is usually given credit for inventing light bulbs, but Jadus points out that students of electrical engineering know better.

Also in the background are images of Tesla’s original patented drawings, like the turbine engine over the third floor door. The glowing squares filled with light bulbs and the devices that Tesla invented cast muted blue shadows that are painted on the mural.

The Sphere in Tesla’s hand is a sacred shape in electromagnetics. In Croatia a golden sphere marks Tesla’s grave. In the mural, the sphere he holds reflects his vision and inventions in the modern world – a wireless cell phone tower, AC power lines and an electric Tesla car in the parking lot.

Tesla’s tireless devotion to his work led him to be somewhat quirky and even though he was very handsome, he never married and eventually became reclusive, with a favorite Pigeon as his friend. At the left, a white pigeon flies across a blue block, leaving a blue shadow as it heads toward Tesla.