QUEENS, N.Y.—It’s an unlikely pairing: Dorothea Rockburne, an abstract painter inspired by mathematics and astronomy, and Colin Powell, politician and former U.S. military general. They are two names, two people, one wouldn’t entirely expect to see connected. And yet this summer at the Queens Museum of Art Rockburne is clocking countless hours — working in public view — on a gigantic canvas mural titled Homage to Colin Powell.

The Canadian-American artist was commissioned by America’s Foundation for Art and Preservation in the Embassies (FAPE) roughly two years ago to create the mural, which will hang in the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica. She had actually met Powell some 15 years ago, at a cocktail party, and found him to be, in her words, “a person of stature,” possessing some indefinable, stately quality. Despite any Bush-related controversy that might hang over the name of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, who was born to Jamaican parents in Harlem, Rockburne accepted the project. “If I didn’t admire him, I wouldn’t have taken the commission,” she told ARTINFO on a recent visit to the Queens Museum.

The project did come with a special challenge, though: Rockburne is not a figurative painter. “I haven’t done a portrait since I was 13,” she says, laughing. So the work, instead of being a portrait of Powell or bearing any likeness at all, is an homage that draws on her penchant for astronomy. It depicts the sky over Jamaica on the night Powell was born, replete with constellations that seem to dance, two arcing cosmic lines (the galactic and ecliptic lines), a golden sun with Venus and Mars nearby, and the head of Aries (Powell’s astrological sign) — all set against a textured background of bands of color that shift from deep, dark blue to turquoise to white and then back.

Which is probably not what most people would conjure when thinking about Colin Powell. For Rockburne, though, it was a natural conclusion. “I didn’t have to think about it; it was just there,” she says.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the mural, however, is its size. When completed, Homage to Colin Powell will measure 41 feet high by 16 feet wide. Not many spaces in New York could allow for such a creation — hence the decision to work on-site at the Queens Museum, whose Large Triangle Gallery offers a comfortable, open space and an enormous wall.

“I think this is the only 42-foot wall in New York City,” says Bill Mensching. He is the vice president and director of the murals studio at EverGreene Architectural Arts, which has supplied assistants and equipment to help Rockburne paint the piece. Also approached by FAPE two years ago, he was the one to locate the wall, after an extensive search that included empty Broadway theaters.

On the afternoon of ARTINFO’s visit, a machine (a “scissor-lift”) that looks as if it would be more at home at a construction site than in an art museum is parked in front of the wall. It moves periodically up and down, carrying five EverGreene artists along for the ride. Their clothes are paint-splattered, and the machine is loud; there is a tarp spread out on the floor, and against the opposite wall a table holds paint canisters and samples, a binder whose pages are filled with drawings for the various sections and layers of the mural, and other trappings of a makeshift studio. The maquette of the mural leans near the table, reflecting its enormous twin taking shape across the way.

Visitors to the Queens Museum can also watch the project take shape as the summer progresses. Rockburne expects to be done sometime in August, after which Homage to Colin Powell will remain in place until early September. It will then be rolled up and shipped to the embassy in Kingston, where a ceremony attended by Rockburne, and presumably Powell, will celebrate its installation.

Back in Queens, standing in the Triangle Gallery, Rockburne points out the one problem with the space: the not-so-great lighting (which Mensching and the museum are working to improve). Still, painting the work all together rather than piecemeal in the studio is important, “because you get to make different decisions when it’s all one piece. You get to nurse it along,” she says. “If you do it in pieces, that’s just color by numbers.”