Their mom died. But the mural she painted with her sons lives on at a Fresno library

is a Fresno Bee series that covers the moments, landmarks and personalities that define what makes living in the Fresno area so special.

Among the design features built into Fresno's Woodward Park Library is a 128 foot-long mural titled "The San Joaquin River: Gravity and Light."

The art piece is a mosaic of styles and media: impressionistic painting and Prismacolor and Pierre Noir pencil drawings fused on a ribbon of art paper that hangs from the ceiling and fully winds itself around the room.

For artist Janice Hansen, seeing the mural installed at the library was her proudest artistic achievement and a legacy of the work she created with three of her sons. Hansen died Nov. 4 at Heritage Crossing Hospice in Clovis. She was 93 years old.

Who was Janice Hansen? Hansen was born at the Clovis Sanitarium in 1931 and grew up in Fresno in a home on S Street a few blocks away from the historic Meux Home . In her early days, back when McKinley Avenue was at the northern edge Fresno, she was known to explore the city via roller skates.

She did her first painting, a portrait in oils, at 17 while a student at Roosevelt High School and was mostly a self-taught artist, though she did enroll in Albert Dorne's "Famous Artist" correspondence course and later (in the 1970s) in extension classes at Fresno State.

She once interviewed for a job at Walt Disney Studios, but at a time when women were only hired to paint the animation cells. Her early art career was spent painting portraits on commission, while keeping busy as a Navy wife and mother to six children.

"Mom let us know that being an artist was a real career that a person could choose," her son Doug Hansen told The Bee last week. "So, I assumed from my youngest days that I would be an artist."

Hansen's own renaissance started when her family relocated back Fresno in 1970.

Her husband Bob Hansen and his brother Chet opened what would become a popular hobby shop in Fig Garden Village. Hansen, meanwhile, took college courses and joined a weekly drawing group at what was then the Fresno Art Center. She worked across media, doing etches on Plexiglas and colored ink washes, fabric art, stained glass and even jewelry.

The San Joaquin River mural The mural wasn't originally intended for the library.

It was commissioned by the Fresno Art Museum in 1997 to serve as its centerpiece exhibit during a 12-week community arts festival dedicated to the San Joaquin River. Hansen was already known for her multimedia creativity and her sons — Doug, Keith and Craig — were established visual artists.

Doug was a staff artist at The Fresno Bee who created a series of Fresno Sketchbooks. He would go on to have a series of children's books.

Keith was a well-known wildlife artist who specialized in California's native birds.

At the time Craig was exhibitions designer for the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Craig took the lead in establishing the concept and composition of the mural," Doug Hansen said.

"Only a few sections in the center of the mural would include conventional landscape views of the river. The rest of the mural consisted of hundreds of images and objects, juxtaposed and overlapping one another, building up incrementally to a grand visual crescendo near the center," he said.

"The way Craig described the mural often reminded me pleasantly of a musical composition."

The project took three years.

Hansen and her sons worked in pairs, shipping small sections of the piece back and forth between Fresno and the Bay Area. If they met in person to collaborate and share their work, it was mostly on holidays. Each artist did whatever was required at the time, and was so competent in the various techniques used, that 30 years later, "we would be challenged, in some spots, to remember who drew or painted what."

The Bee referred to the finished piece as "bunyanesque."

"It's amazing," Craig Hansen told The Bee at the time.

"We're hauling seven tons of rocks into the museum (to be a protective bank along the paper river). When it's installed, it will be so long you'll be able to stand in the little entryway and see both ends of the mural in two different galleries.

"This thing is so long, you can't see it all from one spot. You'll have to follow it along, just the way you do walking the real river. I imagine it will be as much a revelation to us when we first see it in place as it will be to others when they see it."

After the exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum, the mural was quietly rolled up and stuck in a closet at Hansen's home.

But it wasn't forgotten.

On view at the Woodward Park Regional Library Former Fresno County Head Librarian John Kallenberg had seen the mural and remembered it as plans were being drawn up for the system's newest library, which would serve the Woodward Park area.

Working with members of Friends of the Fresno County Public Library, Kallenberg championed the idea of integrating the work into the very design of the building and helped raise the money needed to buy the mural.

So, in 2004, the family revisited the work to be sure it would withstand the permanent installation. As a test run, they hung the mural inside the library at Clovis East High School. They coated the thick paper with varnish to protect its images from the library's ultraviolet lighting, which could cause fading.

The piece was installed over a weekend in April 2004 and opened to public viewing that May, ending what Hansen told The Bee had been a "magical" experience with her sons.

"Working side by side with each of them at various times, or sitting at the table bouncing ideas off each other, discussing plans, I'd sit back and think, 'Oh, my goodness.' I can't imagine that any other mother could experience this."

A memorial service and celebration of Jan's life is planned for early 2025, according to her family.