FARMINGTON—It’s not unusual to see a trampoline in a backyard but a Farmington man has one that will have people doing a double take. Christopher Tracy has a 10x17-foot Olympic-size in-ground trampoline that now has a painting of George Washington Crossing the Delaware to commemorate America’s 250th birthday.

Tracy, who is CEO of trampolines.com, commissioned artist Olympia to paint the mural on the trampoline in his backyard. She just recently completed it after 95 hours over a period of 10 days.

“It’s my first mural in general,” said Olympia. “I’ve been painting for my whole life. I have a lot of creative hobbies and painting was one of my favorites but this is definitely the biggest project I’ve ever done at this large of a scale and certainly my first trampoline.”

“We were thinking at trampolines.com that we wanted to do something to celebrate the 250th,” said Tracy. “I knew her fiancé Drew and he said, ‘hey Olympia does some great artwork.’ So I started to look at her stuff online. It’s really cool to see. So we called her up and said ‘hey would you consider doing this?’”

She took on the challenge, he said. “We knew it would be a challenge because of all the things you think about on a trampoline. It bends, it moves, it gets hot during the summer.”

Olympia asked if they had any requests, Tracy said. “We said we wanted something patriotic and that’s what she came up with.”

“It’s a historical art piece," said Olympia. “It’s Washington Crossing the Delaware which is a historical oil painting. It felt patriotic and it also felt stylistic which is something that I really love is the historical oil painting style so I felt like it was something that hit the patriotic head but also felt true to what I love as an artist.”

It was a lot of hard work, she said. “There was a lot of trial and error for the trampoline mat specifically. We did end up putting some wood boards across so that I could sit on those and then we put out some canopies as well and just shifted those around throughout the day to follow the sun and keep the area shaded – which was great.”

Olympia said she started out with a smaller canvas that was about a sixth of the size of the trampoline where she had all of the proportions to scale on a grid. “Then the first thing I did on the trampoline was map out a grid one foot-by-one foot and then kind of put those proportions from the smaller canvas onto the larger trampoline mat. That’s really helpful when you’re going from something small to something large scale.”

Tracy said he’s not sure whether the elements will ruin the mural. “One night the sprinkler hit it but it didn’t change anything. It was just fine. I think maybe long term with UV rays and water and wind maybe. But so far it’s held up pretty nicely.”

“This is right up my alley,” said Olympia. “I love painting shoes and guitars and phone cases and all sorts of things that you wouldn’t typically see as a canvas so I’m always looking for the next thing I can paint and it’s usually not paper.”

Now Tracy said he has to decide what he’ll do with it. “My friends asked me ‘have you jumped on it yet?’ I’m like, I don’t want to touch it. You know it would feel unpatriotic first off to jump on the flag. It’s kind of hard to jump on George Washington’s face. It would just feel wrong.”