Location: 646 Rock Creek Church Road NW
Readers’ pick: ‘The Doors of Perception’
In a residential neighborhood on the corner of Rock Creek Church Road and Warder Street, a brick wall covered in a motley assortment of front doors opens its colors to onlookers.
“The Doors of Perception” mural features doors weaving through each other to create a collage of multicolored entryways, like a replicated Monsters, Inc. animation. Painted by Juan Pineda in 2014, the mural matches the turn-of-the-century townhouse rows of red brick mixed with bright coats of yellows, reds and blues.
The mural, painted on the side wall of Rock Creek Market, contains doors with rounded tops interspersed among those with typical square heads. The doors are every color — including multiple shades of gray — hiding the actual, unpainted, black door to access the building’s side.
D.C. is steeped in historical murals, with many on U Street featuring famous musicians and other prominent figures. What makes “The Doors of Perception” stand out is its subtlety, the pastels slowly beckoning the viewer in. The colors gleam enough, especially in the sun, to almost blind you as you stare into the otherwise white building.
Effervescent squares of an aqua blue and white sky are visible through painted panels of a brown window frame, deviating from the closed-off doors. The ocean blue of the exposed window matches the rounded door laying atop. Pineda employed the artistic tactic of reverse shading, adding glints of white and lighter tones of color accent the doors instead of highlights with darkened areas.
Very few white spaces make it into the mural, save for winks of white and circles on a three-tiered porthole door on the far right top corner. The glimpses of snowy paint on the rusted tangerine-colored door evoke the soon-to-be-forgotten winter days.
The top of the wall used to contain wood lettering spelling “Rock Creek Market,” before painters covered the sign up with a cool gray version of the same words. A Rock Creek Market employee told me the locale with the mural closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and saw its sign painted over during that time but has reopened since.
The group of doors wedged into the wall of art resemble chairs on porches that I stroll past, like doors of lived-in dwellings lying cheek-to-cheek.
