Around lunchtime Monday, Alex Stelios-Wills stood in Catfish Alley adding a little more brown paint to the small, Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand.

He swirled the mixture with a brush until it blended into a heavy orange — the color he was seeking — then pulled the brush from the cup and slowly started to fill in a car depicted in a mural along an alleyway wall.

It’s been nearly 10 months since someone defaced the Catfish Alley mural — a tribute to the city’s historic black business district — by slinging white paint across it.

At the time that it happened, Stelios-Wills, a MUW art professor who painted the mural with help from his students, was hoping the white paint would wipe off with ease. The mural had been sealed with a “graffiti-proof” finish, but the white paint splattered on the mural was thick and gunky.

Stelios-Wills said Monday that the paint was likely the type used on roadways. Thus, he was forced to use powerful chemicals to remove it.

“It was really, really strong,” Stelios-Wills said. “The only thing that worked (removing the paint) was varnish remover.”

City officials and Stelios-Wills had discussed trying to order special products to help removal the white paint, but after several months of waiting, Stelios-Wills just decided to go for it.

“I’m just repainting it at this point,” he said of the large, southern portion of the mural hit by white paint. “And it shouldn’t take long … hopefully when it’s all done it will be as good as new.”

He expects to finish his restoration by next weekend and will be working on it in-between completing his work this semester with MUW. The project has been on his mind for a long time.

“We’re very grateful for the talent he has and what he’s doing,” said Columbus chief operating officer David Armstrong. “It’s a damn shame anybody tried to ruin it.”

Stelios-Wills is restoring the mural as a volunteer. Armstrong said the city installed a camera in Catfish Alley three months ago, so any future vandals will be observed.

“If they do it, they will get caught,” Armstrong said.

The restoration of the mural will help make an ugly scene pleasant once again.

“I just knew that simply being able to see the figures more clearly would make people feel a lot better, like something was getting done,” Stelios-Wills said.

Mural restoration was the field in which the art professor began after grad school. He said he was hired to restore murals in Massachusetts, where winter weather can erode projects quickly. This work, he said, is anti-climatic. Though it took a long time to happen, the process is fairly easy.

“It’s just a matter of putting down the layers and seeing how well it works,” he said.