Murals have been a big part of my life as an artist for about 15 years. As a studio artist whose predominant focus is making medium- to smaller-scale work for gallery shows, painting murals makes me feel powerful. It’s really exciting to get a chance to stretch beyond my own physical limitations. For those interested, I am 5 feet and 1 inch tall, though I’ve been told that I tend to carry myself as a much taller person and have gotten better at speaking louder in order to not be ignored. My own version of a Napoleon complex.

 

While murals are a part of my life as an artist, they have always generally been for private clients and not always for the public. In the summer of 2022, I was offered a three-month residency with 4Heads, an artist-run organization based in New York City, established in 2008. They were the first group to create art programs on Governors Island, which is a five minute ferry ride off of downtown Manhattan. The historic island was used during the American Revolutionary War (there are two really cool original forts there), later a military base and is now a city-run public park. 4Heads ran a very popular art fair on Governors Island (which ended in 2019) and an Artist Residency along the historic Colonel’s Row, made up of 19th-century brick and wood framing that were once officers quarters. I grew up in busy Queens, New York, and I currently live in West Harlem, uptown in Manhattan. While I had an hour-plus commute by subway and ferry ride, I came to look forward to getting to the calm of Governors Island.

A Collective Glow, acrylic on wood, 22½ x 32" (57 x 81 cm)

For this residency, I wanted to flex my mural muscles and paint a full room for myself. In my original application, I had proposed a “Neon Space Jungle.” I would paint the whole room to look like outer space and neon houses with a lush forest littered with birds, and possibly a new set of paintings that would be created and incorporated into the space. I was basically planning to combine all my favorite elements into one big mush of an idea. It’s funny looking back on the original ideas.

As I struggled to plan the mural, I spent the first month at my residency working on a piece for a group show. This allowed me to reconsider what exactly I wanted to say in a full room mural. Do I make something that was wild and over the top or did I want to go deep and tell a personal story? I was working on the painting A Collective Glow, a piece about healing deep wounds with those that are closest to me. My closest friends depicted in the form of sparrows with string closing up the bleeding glowing heart of the pigeon, who represents myself.

Home Away From Home Away From Home, acrylic on wood, 24 x 20" (60 x 50 cm)

Birds are fascinating to me and have played a very important part in my work for many years. Here you have a large species in which each individual looks and behaves differently from one another. It’s such a large pool of personalities to play off of. Incorporating birds in my work has a way of softening my personal stories. They are like a visual gateway and help leave plenty of room for open interpretations.

Quietly working on a small piece in this large room really gave me time to get acclimated to my new space. The houses are old, historic and a bit shabby. I was advised by the members of 4Heads to allow the room to be the room and not spend too much time fighting its quirks and cracks.

 

Having a big personal space for myself gave me a chance to expand on a sensitive theme that I had really only touched upon previously. I lost my mother to cancer when I was 27 years old in 2009. While I was already an adult, I always look back on that age with ambivalence. Did I handle her grief in a healthy way? At what age does one ever know how to handle grief? I was 40 years old at the time of creating this mural. In all that time, I have lived my sum of sadnesses and have lost others who are close to me. Most notably both my grandmother and grandfather—my mother’s parents—passed away in 2020 and 2022 respectively. At 27, I understood that dying at 50 was a huge loss. At 40, I spent most of the year thinking, “If I were to die at 50, what do I want to spend the next 10 years of my life doing?”

In 2021, I made my first really personal work about my mother entitled Home Away From Home Away From Home. In this painting, my mother is the graceful blue heron flying into the sunset. On her back is a neon house representing the “ideal of home.” The three red-winged black birds are my two sisters and me chasing after her for all of eternity. This piece would become my guide.

 

There were a few objectives for this mural project. I first wanted the mural to tell the story of love and death and the release of memories and emotions, with the whole room ending in a full circle. Expanding on this piece as a mural would give me a chance to further tell the story of chasing home and then ultimately finding that “Home is where the Love is.” I also wanted to incorporate my experience on Governors Island into the room. As I mentioned, I love painting birds and have even started photographing birds as a hobby and for references in 2020. Governors Island is a great place to bird watch as it is away from the city and is home to a lot of migrating birds, especially in the spring and summer during the residency. There were so many swallows that it felt like they were practically flying into you!

 

Designing for one large wall is one thing. To design a full room 360-degree mural was quite another. I had to consider the full scope and feel. I decided that I would start with designing two walls and work from there. Because this was not for a client, I had more wiggle room to let the room grow on its own. Not because I like to play jazz with my projects. Quite the opposite. In general, I am a planner to a fault and efficiency is key. But the beauty of this project was that I had time and there was no money involved. What I would get to accomplish in two months, a normal paid gig would have maybe allowed me two weeks with the help of an assistant if necessary. Also, I simply had no idea what to do beyond two of the walls. I created full-scale digital mockups in Photoshop, incorporating found online materials and some of my own photography. I kept them full-scale (the files were huge) because I knew it would help me establish just how big everything would be when they actually landed onto the wall.

I painted a base coat of a light periwinkle and then worked on the whole sky on and off over the course of about two weeks. This instantly transformed the room from stark white to a visual medley of oranges and purples and blues. Walking in every day during this phase made me so happy that sometimes I would just sit on the ground and stare. It set the mood and helped me stay motivated.

For most of my murals, I would make a line drawing, project them onto the wall and draw directly from that. I decided against using the projector method because there were four walls that were getting done at very different times and each full of variables. There was a fireplace, windows and several doors to contend with. I also needed to keep the sizes of the main characters (especially the neon birds) super consistent across all the walls, and projectors are finicky and make it hard to keep things exact. Instead, I made line drawings and blew them up to scale at a copy shop. They were huge copies that I would tape to the wall and transfer with colored chalk paper. I used Saral transfer paper in white, red and yellow because my sky was dark and I needed to see the drawing on the wall.

 

The whole story begins in the back of the room, which is what the viewer would see when they initially walked in. This was actually the last wall that was designed. It was started and completed less than two weeks before the deadline of August 2022.

A big yellow neon house, lifted up by three swallows (my favorite is the one on the bottom right with her little squishy face) releases a flock of neon birds that fly to the right and would intermingle with all the “real” birds. I filled the space above the mantle with neon birds and a single blue swallow. All the neon birds are flying in the same direction, and they naturally pull the viewers to the right and into the storyline. They established a graceful momentum.

The neon birds were a way to visually tie everything together. I chose fluorescent pink because it was such a stark contrast from the natural colors of the birds and would immediately inform the viewer that we are in the presence of magic. Incorporating painted neon elements into my work has been a way for me to put a unique stamp on my projects for the last few years. The neon would ultimately be a way to “light up” the space in an otherwise dark setting. My favorite thing was adding the bouncing pink light to the birds. It made everything look so yummy and satisfying! Also, every single neon bird was the same size. This kept me from going insane every time I needed to add extra birds to the scene. I would simply transfer from the same bird drawings and voila. I used Golden heavy body acrylic paint in fluorescent pink and titanium white to achieve the artificial glow of the neon birds. In general, I painted these birds in batches like an assembly line. On days when I was super tired and my body hurt, I would only paint neon birds because they were comparatively easy and their repetition soothing.

 

The following wall has three red-winged black birds each representing my two sisters and myself, together with the neon birds, all swooping towards the next panel. I love red-winged black birds. They look like regular black birds until they take flight, revealing glorious red and yellow patches on their wings. The birds also have loud, obnoxious calls and are everywhere on Governors Island. Red-winged black birds were a natural fit to be stand-ins for my sisters and me, because they are cute but loud.

There were also doors on two of the walls. Once again, the neon birds saved me from having to paint anything too intricate, and it was really fun making the doors disappear.

The main wall is the one with my “Mother Bird,” the blue heron. It was important for me to choose a bird that could loom large and be a special presence. When you lose someone that you love, their memory can somehow become sublime and otherworldly. That’s how I feel when I see a blue heron. They are real and mythical all at the same time.

Like my painting Home Away From Home Away From Home, this heron also carries on her back a neon house. The house is fluorescent pink like the neon birds. I wanted it to feel like the neon birds were once a part of the house and are looking to return. In telling the story of the mural, the neon birds represent hopes, dreams, love and fear. By being released into the world at the beginning of the story, they establish the cycle of life and death. We are born into this world and we are all potential and all that surrounds that potential. The neon birds are that pulsating energy that we create, and it glows bright and then dims and grows bright again and so on. Here, that energy is let loose and wants to find the safety of home.

This wall also has a pigeon at the far right that leads us into the final wall, which features a big neon blue hoop being held up by two more pigeons. There are two swallows and neon birds that pass through the hoop and towards the window to the right, signaling the completion of the story.

The big loop is many things for me. Yes, it is the cycle of life itself. But it is also the passageway in which life and grief make a transition into something bigger. It is that big sublime feeling I got after my mother passed away. That feeling of buoyant space, air and eternity that manifested itself as visions of an enormous bright wind tunnel that I felt like I was whooshing through every day for weeks. If I closed my eyes, I could feel the warm breeze of it on my skin. Sometimes it scared me, and sometimes I was comforted by it.

The swallows that both start and end the story, along with the pigeons, are the people in our lives that hold us up and help us move into the new stages of our lives following grief. While one can argue that grief always sits with us, it is those who love us the most who make the grief less of a presence in our lives on a daily basis. Our friends and family hold up the loop to show us what life is, and then help us into the next phase. Over and over again.  —