An artist is using sprinklers to paint the walls of a massive Spring Garden apartment complex

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When artist Douglas Hoekzema, also known as HOXXOH, starts a new public art project, he goes to the nearest garden center.

The Miami-based muralist sprays paint through various garden hose sprinkler attachments sold off the shelf. Through trial and error, Hoekzema discovered, for example, that an oscillating lawn sprinkler will spray a cross-hatch pattern.

“I have another one that spins so it makes a spirograph pattern. Another one shoots a cone of paint about six feet wide,” he said. “Most of us have a memory as a kid running through sprinklers, so there are some nice nostalgic moments. Anything you can pump water out of, I’m pumping paint out of.”

Hoekzema couples two attachments to each other: a pistol nozzle with a trigger lever is screwed into an oscillating sprinkler. With a pull of the trigger a burst of paint explodes out of the sprinkler, dancing across the wall like a Jackson Pollock action painting.

“Yeah, it’s a little Pollock-y,” he said. “This is not CIA-funded, but I wish it was,” he said, referencing the federal government’s covert support of Pollock and abstract expressionism in the 1950s as a part of the Cold War.

“This is as action as it gets,” he chuckled, navigating an army of workers putting the final touches on The Noble, a new apartment complex he was hired to paint. “The environment is action. The painting is action. It’s action-packed. I feel like we’re pitching a summer movie with Will Smith, or something.”

Hoekzema was commissioned by Mural Arts Philadelphia and National Real Estate Development, the developer of The Noble apartment complex on Spring Garden Street, to paint the steel corrugated fence running around the perimeter of the 12,000-square-foot public patio area.

“Our team really responded to HOXXOH’s work. We love the vibrancy. We love the free-form nature of it,” said senior development manager Pete Epstein. “We also responded to the scale and thought it would work very well with what we have here. Like there’s a lot of wall space and I’ve come to understand that he is well within his wheelhouse.”

Hoekzema’s unique method of large-scale murals has gotten him commissions around the world. Clients must embrace a certain degree of chaos in the artist’s technique.

“I can give concept drawings that are very close, but it’s never going to be exactly like that through the nature of these unusual mechanisms,” he said. “Things clog, or break, or kind of explode. I know what it should do, but it’s always gonna throw you a curveball and do something you didn’t expect. You just gotta dance with it.”

The Noble hired local Philadelphia artists for some of its interior spaces. A large mural by Nate Harris features cartoon illustrations of city life — sports, dining, art — greets residents in the mailbox room off the lobby. The large bicycle storage room on Second Street has a grid of abstract skateboard ramps by Jim Houser.

Hoekzema’s more unwieldy mark-making style was reserved for the outdoors in the semi-public garden patio. This is his first gig in Philly.

“I’m super honored to be painting for the Philly mural program,” he said. “It’s the oldest mural program in the world, 40 years. There’s no city in the world that comes close to that. For me as a muralist, I view this as the World Series of murals.”