One of the very few downsides to living in downtown Portland is the thick, lung-chocking stench of crude oil that sometimes blankets the city. When I lived in the West End, I would frequently wake from a dead sleep because this toxic air had blown in through the open windows. In Bayside, we don't get the foul odor as often, but every few weeks it pollutes our air and drives away the sea salt scented breezes. When I lived on the Hill, I never once smelled this petroleum stench. (But then that part of town has its own odor issues.)

Since the smell is so much stronger and more frequent in the West End, I'm figuring it comes from oil tankers off-loading their ethically-challenged product into the ugly storage tanks on the South Portland side of the Fore River. I keep hoping someone will come up with a solution to this smelly problem. And while I'm still waiting for my oil smell Superman to arrive, someone has come up with an idea to de-uglify the storage tanks themselves.

That someone is the Maine Center for Creativity. Just this week the organization unveiled the five finalists vying to have their designs painted on "the most prominent oil tanks at the Sprague Energy tank farm in South Portland." And while I knew enough not to expect anything political (such as a big "No blood for oil" graphic), I was hoping for humor (something like "Can you smell me now?" would have been good). Instead, these artists are obviously professionals and they all went the graphic and mostly abstract route. (Which means any number of subliminal messages could be hidden within these works, and who could prove it?)

The winner will be selected next month and installation should be complete by 2011. If it was up to me, I'd pick the Catherine Callahan design that looks like an airplane level view of the harbor. Which one would you pick?

Catherine Callahan and Bret LeBleu of South Portland

Holger Friese of Berlin

Jaime Gili of London

Nicole Langille of Columbus, Ohio

Bo Nathan Newsome of Durham, N.C., and Sara Lambert Bloom of South Portland