The street art festival is my favorite event in Richmond hands down. I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to paint in such an iconic place with so many iconic artists! This one is open to your interpretation, and I'd love to hear your take on it, or just hear you take a big breath ;)
Thanks to my wall neighbors Chris Visions and Sean McClintock and to my whole famdamly for showing up to say hi. Also big thanks to Zammuto for writing a song that kept me company and helped me and my friends laugh during some of the most baffling moments of 2020. It Can Feel So Good is a banger forever.
The fire is from a photograph of a wildfire that started in a national park in Tennessee near Chattanooga and Dollywood in 2016, and was the most fatal fire on this side of the country.
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.
An unconventional portrait of Richmond, viewed from within. Painted in a historic residence, built 1892.
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.
The mystical creatures overlooking this simplified Icelandic countryside are all based on real motifs in viking artifacts.
2016 is my second year participating in the RVA Street Art Festival, which is a local event run by some of the most active art proponents in the city: Ed Trask and Jon Baliles. This was the VIP lounge for the duration of the festival - I painted the front, and Sir James Thornhill painted the back.
This design is based on a little silk painting I did a while ago, crossed with a small piece I did for Light Grey Art Lab's show Botanica. The word "thrive" has really stuck with me, and I think it's a message I'm willing to repeat over and over. Words are often a natural addition to a lot of my design solutions, but I avoid them because I think they narrow the possible interpretations of an image. Sometimes, however, they amplify or focus the imagery in a totally positive way.
Cobalt Studios is a top-tier scenic painting studio in White Lake, NY. I was lucky enough to spend part of a summer there learning about scenic painting techniques with the inimitable Rachel Keebler and Kimb Williamson. As part of a much longer trip, I found some time to stop back by Cobalt and throw some paint around in the house where students live while enrolled. My friend Sarah Abernathy gave me a great excuse to come visit and a helpful hand in the actual painting.
This design is based on a little silk painting I did a while ago and fell in love with. The word "thrive" has really stuck with me, and I think it's a message I'm willing to repeat over and over. Words are often a natural addition to a lot of my design solutions, but I avoid them because I think they narrow the possible interpretations of an image. Sometimes, however, they amplify or focus the imagery in a totally positive way.
This design was inspired partly by a friend's band, Early Bizrd and the Bees, and partly by this wonderful campaign by Louis Masai.
I got to join a dozen other painters at the Richmond Tattoo and Arts Festival and put up another little bee lady. She was painted 8’ x 8’ on plywood and later auctioned off to benefit Art 180. ART 180 is a Richmond, Virginia based group that creates and provides art-related programs for young people living in challenging circumstances, encouraging personal and community change through self-expression with the goal of turning lives and communities around 180 degrees.
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!
Starting in 2012, I initiated and organized the senior portfolio show for my graduating class at VCU's Communication Arts department. This epic, year-long undertaking gave me experience with event coordination, booking a space, volunteers, printing, hanging a show, liaison duties, and delegation, not to mention preparing work for a show and selling art.
The best part of this process was painting a mural for the show.
The mural design was key: the image would not only be a 13 foot tall announcement welcoming people to the show as they entered the gallery, it would also serve as the identity for the show, get printed on posters and postcards, and function online for social media and the department's website.
This design was inspired by the imagery of a potted plant - when you pull it out to re-pot it, its roots have likely spiraled and snared around each other, outgrowing their current container but with nowhere to go. For us, graduation was a time of release and exposure. All packed in cozily together as we were, it will take us a few stretches now to find our new shapes.
With several volunteers helping, I was also able to make a spotlit list of all the artists participating in the show, as well as hand-label each artist's spot with their name.
The Carleys’ son Thomas is really really into firetrucks. He can identify more kinds of firehouse-related vehicles than I've even heard of. (Do you know the difference between a tanker truck and an engine? Thomas does.) He was already well on his way to having a firetruck themed room before I came along.
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.
HerrSuite was the Artist of the Month at New Normal Apparel, a local shop that designs, fabricates, and screen-prints clothing and accessories. This involved two custom HerrSuite prints, a solo show of my work, and two murals (one of which I painted live at the show opening.)
After two months (bonus time!) the murals were painted over to make way for the next artist.
Kosovo is a young country with a long history, and its identity is in the hands of today's young people.
The locations depicted are scenes from my introduction to Ferizaj, where the city streets are busy and close, and the consistent background of the mountains is revealed between buildings. The blank wall at the center is a message of possibility to the students in the university who will see this in class.
This is the first indoor wall to be part of this program, located at the University of Applied Sciences in Ferizaj. I was blown away by the amazing program of MuralFest Kosova and how much this team has positively impacted their city, not just during a summer art festival but year-round, for seven years. My hope is that this mural can symbolize the impact they have had, and hold it up as an example for how to involve oneself in the work being done to build the future of your home.