An earthy smell greeted artist Bill Wolfe early in the restoration of a 73-year-old mural by Terre Haute legend Gilbert Wilson. It was a smell Wolfe recognized, but it seemed out of place. He couldn’t figure out why he could smell the Wabash River as he cleaned the dark brown swirls in part of Wilson’s 1936 mural in the former Laboratory School, now University Hall, on the campus of Indiana State University. “I realized it was the river. He had used clay from the river to make some of the colors for this mural,” Wolfe said as he approached the final days of the restoration.

That creativity is rather fitting with Wilson’s overall work on the mural. It’s anti-war theme depicts humankind’s negative stewardship of the earth –war and chemical devastation have a long-lasting effect. It would not be unfair to deem the mural “creepy” in a way. There is the skeleton of a soldier buried with his rifle and ammunition, as well as a gas mask and swirls that evoke the poison of mustard gas.

Wilson worked on the mural for six weeks in 1936, intertwining the waste of Mother Earth and the waste of human life. A plow and the dusty fields portray the ecological devastation of the Dust Bowl that swept across America from 1930s. Nearby is a utopia of a waterfall and rocks observed by a person lying on green grass. But the person has a thought stream that spreads into the gas mask and its cloudy menace. Bombs and pickets and pitted ground spread into a healthy crop field, but buried underneath is the skeleton soldier with his gun. Looming behind the crops is a menacing red sky.

Artist Wolfe has talked to many former students who passed the mural during their school days. “They say they never noticed the scary images,” Wolfe said. The mural is above eye level, especially above the heads of the youngsters that would have entered the southern doors of the school and climbed the steps below the mural.

But as they looked ahead into the hallway, they would have been greeted by a different mural over an arched entryway that is definitely more positive and seems disconnected from the war and death theme. Multicultural hands reach upward, together, toward a central orb. But it is unclear what the hands are reaching toward. Is it a common goal? God? Light at the end of the tunnel? Wolfe suggests that Wilson’s intent was to say, “There it is. Think about it.” In fact, Wilson did leave a slight clue as to the meaning of the reaching hands. He wrote that it is “to be interpreted by the viewer.” That is very unlike the more than two pages that Wilson wrote to describe his thoughts behind the ecological message of the other parts of the mural.

Born in 1907 and raised in Terre Haute, Wilson was active during a time a great social activism and was influenced by controversial and famous locals Eugene V. Debs, Paul Dreiser, Max Ehrmann and other diverse thinkers. The public murals he created in 1934 are preserved and still viewable at Woodrow Wilson Middle School.

He attended Indiana State University, the Chicago Art Institute, and was an apprentice to the mural painter and sculptor Eugene Savage. He also attended Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and was influenced by Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and Jose David Alfaro Siqueros.

ISU has five Wilson art pieces in addition to the Lab School mural. In the foyer of Tilson Auditorium is one of the most visible. “They Who Work Humbly” is a piece from 1932 that was influenced by Rivera. Wilson traveled to the East Coast and ended his days in Frankfort, Ky., where he died in 1991. He worked on art interpreting Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick.” Though that project did not earn as much recognition as his early murals, the art went on a national tour and a film based on the drawings won an award at the Venice Film Festival.

More than 300 individual Wilson artworks are now at the Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute, which became holder of the definitive collection of Wilson artwork after a series of gifts from Wilson’s nephews, who owned the majority of the artist’s work after his death.

The restoration of the mural at ISU as part of the $29.8 million renovation of University Hall keeps Wilson’s talent in the public eye. When selected for the restoration project, artist Wolfe noted that such work was away from his typical style, but it was not something out of his capabilities.

Wolfe first went to work on the restoration, carefully clearing  away about 73 years of dust. “The first thing to look at was what his process was,” Wolfe said. Water damage above the south door allowed him to see the underpainting where the pastel colors had washed off the walls. “The main thing to me is to carry on what he had done and bring back the colors to the way they originally were, and not to damage anything,” Wolfe said. “It was important to me not to put my style on it. This is Gilbert Wilson’s work, and I want to make it look as good as possible.”

Due to some damage during the recent renovation of the building, which now houses ISU’s College of Education, the head of the skeleton was missing. Fortunately, photos of the skeleton were available, so Wolfe had the photo enlarged and projected onto the wall after it had been replastered. He then sketched it in and was able to match the original colors. In some areas, the pastel had come off the walls. Opening the exterior doors about a million times over the years allowed heat and cold and humidity to reach the artwork. “What I had to do then, what pastel was left, I could rub my finger on it gently, and it would come off so I could see the color to match,” Wolfe said.

He began the project using the same type of Rembrandt pastels that Wilson used, but he eventually had to branch out to other pastels to match all of the colors. He placed new pastel on top of the original, matching the same lines and strokes that Wilson used. And it wasn’t always easy. Wilson was left-handed, so the right-handed Wolfe had to learn to use his left hand to copy the same strokes.

Like Wilson, Wolfe also attended Indiana State, only decades later. He now has a studio in West Terre Haute, and focuses on life-size monuments. He was recently selected to create a bronze World War II memorial in the Hendricks County community of Avon.

Wolfe will next incorporate the techniques he has learned in the mural restoration to create new murals in the Vigo County Courthouse to document the history of the area. At least one wall will be devoted to St. Mother Theodore Guerin, founder of St. Mary-of-the-Woods College. Another wall will be of county namesake Francis Vigo, Wolfe said, and the art will also include President John F. Kennedy’s speech on the courthouse steps.

“There are so many people and things to incorporate into the murals, I’m getting a list of things to go into it,” Wolfe said. While his own style is different from Gilbert Wilson’s, it is interesting to note that Wilson’s artistic influence in the Wabash Valley, even if only by restoration, will be carried on through the new mural created by Wolfe.