“We kind of hit the sweet spot between following the rules and making an elegant statement to the contrary,” says Constable.
Constable, who works in business development, has lived in the same house in Seaside for 29 years. For most of that time, his boat trailer — often with a boat attached — has sat in his driveway without issue. But in July 2023, he received a letter from the city, asserting that the municipal code requires that boats and trailers be “screened on the side and front by a six-foot-high fence,” and threatening him with a citation and a $100 fine if he failed to comply. (The Washington Post has reviewed the letter.)
To Constable, the letter came out of nowhere. The ordinance itself is not new. He hadn’t heard any complaints from neighbors, and he’s kept the boat, which he named Might as Well and uses to fish “as often as I can,” for four years in his driveway.
“I thought, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and my first reaction was to leave a nasty, nasty message at the city hall,” he says. “And then I thought, well, I might as well build a screen … I’ll do what they want, but I’m not going to do it their way.”
So he started brainstorming. That’s when he had a chat with his neighbor, Hanif Panni, a muralist and graphic artist, about potentially painting the fence to look exactly like the space it was built to cover up. The two batted ideas back and forth over the fence that separated their yards. “We wanted to make an illusion,” says Panni.
Panni, whose artist name is Hanif Wondir, was in. He had other projects on his docket, and wasn’t able to start painting the boat on the fence until early May. It took four days to complete. As he worked, people driving or walking by would stop to comment on the optical illusion, and a few neighbors told him that they, too, had received letters about the ordinance, says Panni.
The actual fence cost a few hundred bucks, per Constable, who did the labor himself. He paid Panni for painting the mural, too.
With Constable’s permission, Panni shared the finished work on social media. It quickly went viral.
“The more people see something, the more opinions there are about it … and it’s just so fun to see those branches stemming off of something that I created,” says Panni. “ … One of the reasons why I do public art, and art in general, is to inspire those conversations.”
There’s one dialogue that hasn’t happened yet. Constable hasn’t heard anything from Seaside about the mural. (The city has not responded to requests for comment from The Post.) But Constable is pretty sure they’re aware of the street-facing painting: “It’s not like I’m hiding anything.”
