iterate
TRIED AND TRUE
TECHNIQUES
This wall is squinched between a few buildings in Scott’s Addition, an old industrial neighborhood in Richmond, VA that now has fresh crops of co-working spaces, luxury apartments, breweries, etc. This mural adds some life to an otherwise sterile alley between an excellent coffee shop (Afterglow) and an extraordinary restaurant (Brenner Pass) and my now-deceased favorite coffee shop in the city (Chairlift, RIP)
There's a mix of concepts that got me to this final design, including trust, safety, passing time, and the complex beauty of the world around us. I designed and painted this in the first couple months of the COVID-19 lockdown period, just before some of the first moments of the 2020 uprising. Even though it’s one of my more abstract designs, it’s very informed by that deeply charged period of time.
I think that the doorway is an interesting feature of the wall, so I used it as a place for people to 'find' a quote that ties into my inspiration for the design, led there by the rest of the composition. “You are BORN. You was NOT. Now you IS.” is a quote from Chicken Soup, Boots by Maira Kalman. It’s an amazing kid’s book about all the ways you can live your life, as long as you’ve got it.
Way out on the edge of the city of Richmond, just past the airport, Meta née Facebook built a data center. 90% of the building is for the electronics, and in the last 10% they did a lot to make the meatspace pleasant for their employees.
I seek to bring an illustrative mindset to muralism, creating a sense of place, character, and narrative. In such a digital environment, an injection of the natural world acts as an agent of balance.
Mural in Charlottesville, VA painted for Tom Tom Fest 2017 on Charlottesville Day School.
Campfire & Co.'s interior design for Gather, a co-working space opening their third location, called for an accent wall flowing abstract colors reminiscent of water.
When Quirk Hotel started work on a second location, I was absolutely delighted to work with André Shank to create something special for their rooftop bar and restaurant. Since we’d both worked with Quirk before on a few different projects, this was a comfortable opportunity to go out on a limb! They entrusted us with a free-reign approach, and the two of us approached the wall with only an idea for the process but no design.
André and I were able to bounce off of each other’s colors and shapes to discover this footloose and fancy-free mural that surprised both of us! Huge thanks to André for being an extraordinary vibesmith and to Adam Dorland and Katie Ukrop for encouraging our experimentation.
This piece is a love letter and an invitation to love. A pair of roses silhouette a painted collage - the pictures I filled this space with are all slices of Richmond. Glimpses of skyline, reflections on the river, phone lines against the sky all blur together to create a warm textured portrait of the city.
As shown below, the first layer of this process is the energetic broad strokes of this portrait, creating an abstract frenzy of color. The second layer is the delicate transparent white that carves away at the frenzy to sculpt the shapes of the two roses. For me this is a joyful and honest display of the creative process - “write drunk, edit sober” as they say. It also alludes to the romaticization of everyday life - every day is over-filled with criss-crossing intentions and plot-lines, but with a gentle and visionary hand, you can compose the story of your experience that you want to tell.
From Quirk Hotel’s website: Each room not only spotlights Richmond's established artists, but supports its next generation of talent with a percentage of each booking benefiting VisArt's Make Space, a program pairing sixth-grade girls with female artists for a year of mentorship and art-making.
This accent wall was designed for The Broad. From their site:
"The Broad is a MAKING SPACE in Richmond.
A community center where we can learn from each other, a workspace where we can get it done, and a clubhouse where we can connect IRL - a place that exists to make more space for women* in Richmond, in our community, and in our world.
A space to take a meeting over coffee, catch up with a friend with a glass (or two) of wine, put in some work during the 9-5, get your yoga on in our weekly classes, enjoy a workshop or a panel on art or money or flower arranging or love - because we are multifaceted people in a multifaceted world and it's totally cool to be into astronomy AND astrology, curious about super serums AND the supernatural, and invested in the stock market AND the outcome of Bachelor In Paradise.
At The Broad, we're making space so you have space. Space to learn, grow, connect, work, and BE. The Broad is a space for us.
*The Broad is an LGBTQIA+ Friendly Space that does not have a binary view of womanhood"
Outside of Washington DC, “the majority of the world’s internet traffic passes through the town of Ashburn in Loudoun County, Virginia, home to one of the world's major internet exchanges.” Meta née Facebook built a data center there in 2019. 90% of the building is for the electronics, and in the last 10% they did a lot to make the meatspace pleasant for their employees.
In such a digital environment, an injection of the natural world acts as an agent of balance. This design is collaged together from my gouache paintings of many places I've been, put through the filter of my eyes and brain and hands and paint and paper and computer and projector and eyes and brain and hands and friend and paint again. Smooshed.
Two walls painted for a new restaurant under Campfire & Co's design direction, in just 12 hours, with the help of two awesome friends.
In preparing for their third child, the Carleys decided they would leave the gender of the baby a surprise. Therefore the room they converted to a nursery needed to be warm, comforting, whimsical, and gender-neutral. Hopefully these clouds will inspire the newest Carley's imagination as she or he grows up!
The owner of Sefton Coffee Co. and Apropos is opening a new store just around the corner called 7th St. Supply Co. She asked for a mural that was flowery and subtle, matching the colors that she had already picked for the building's exterior.
To accommodate the giant plate windows, I worked with Cut Cut: a vinyl shop just next door that specializes in working on unique creative projects. They took my design and applied vinyl that carried the flowers from wall to window.
Sefton Coffee Co. is my new favorite coffee shop in Richmond because of their sweet and airy space, extensive menu (for a coffee shop), and friendly folk. I'm lucky enough that in addition to these nice qualities they also had a big blank wall that needed some painting.
I sketched a design which I thought would flow with the organic, soft, and simple feel of the place. It needed to be fairly large without feeling like it was screaming for attention, so I stuck with the very low contrast of white on green (the original wall color). As always I tried to incorporate the architecture and structural flow of the space, in this case by growing the tree up from the door frame and counter, spilling over the molding, and wrapping the words around to the next wall.
HerrSuite was invited to collaborate on a mural with Sure Hand Signs as part of the new program Welcoming Walls. Our styles work well together - Ross's "Rise and Shine" meshed nicely with a birds-and-plants pattern that you may recognize from a couple of my other small projects.
This was an awesome and intense 3-day experience. On the first half-day we got help from Altria volunteers, but the rest was just us and the hot hot sun in front of a white reflective wall on top of a big asphalt heat sink. I'd love to do it again.
"Welcoming Walls RVA is a project dedicated to bringing large scale public art to the highways and gateways of Richmond Virginia in an effort to boost civic pride, increase tourism, and solidify our city's reputation as a capital of culture and creativity."
- www.welcomingwallsrva.com
This unconventional mural was a self-motivated school project-come-community service project. Hidden around the back wall of the museum are 13 different birds native to the Richmond area. A list shows the birds to find, and a quick fact about each one.
This project is dedicated to Lois Herr, stalwart bird-watcher, loving grandmother, and amazing lady.
Spang TV is a video production company based in Richmond, with a glorious production space in Northside. THIS space is a smaller, cozier office nestled downtown for post-production. Here, the magic of graphics, animation, color-correction, music, formatting take place. Here, they bring it all together and add the final touches.
This mural in their entryway acts as a sign, but also sets the mood for making the magic happen. I had fun with this opportunity to embellish a typical botanical landscape with luxurious color and imagined elements. The shape of the logo acts as a viewfinder for the lush landscape overflowing the wall - inside the viewfinder, everything is a little brighter, richer, and more intriguing….