Mural mural on the wall: Artists bringing faraway places to local homes, businesses

Thursday, Sept. 6, 2001 | 8:27 a.m.

Talking with Kathy Roark in her tiny, cluttered Las Vegas office, it's nearly impossible not to drift off while looking out on the courtyard of a New Orleans-French Quarter-style home.

It's a workday. There are things to be done. But somehow, the afternoon sun casting shadows from the trees onto the stone sidewalk lures you into curiously exploring the bricks and the crevices of the home's grand garden entrance.

It's dreamy. It's idyllic. It's a painting.

Roark, a muralist, painted the Southern scenery onto a shade that hung on a window in her Las Vegas home 15 years ago. By pulling down the shade, she was able to change the view taking her visually to New Orleans in a matter of seconds.

She later mounted the painting and hung it on the wood-paneled wall at Artistic Illusions, her mural-painting business and studio on East Charleston Boulevard, to create a faux window. A painter for 30 years, Roark is a pro when it comes to creating grand illusions by painting realistic murals, turning living rooms into jungles, bedrooms into Roman palaces and kitchens into stone fortresses.

And in Las Vegas, where spacious homes with vaulted ceilings sprout heartily, the sky is literally the limit for thirsty muralists and wall painters hired to breathe life into the airy homes.

Between faux finishes (to achieve marbleized and antique looks, among others), trompe l'oeil (trick-of-the eye-paintings that fill or create niches and windows) and wall-size hyperrealistic paintings of patios that overlook distant oceans, grassy paths, dense forests or French countrysides, artists have no shortage of ideas when it comes to creatively warming up a home.

"There is really no limit to what you can do with paint," said artist Catherine Roberson Humber, owner of Carpe Diem Artforms in Las Vegas.

Her clients have spent up to $20,000 to have art painted on their walls an effort Humber explains simply as a completion of the full picture.

She compares wall painting to portraiture on a canvas: When painting a portrait, an artist never leaves the canvas blank, so why keep blank the walls of a decorated room?

"You can have a fabulous $5,000 sofa in front of a blank white wall, (yet) it doesn't really speak," Humber said, explaining that her job is to carry out the theme of the decor be it Old World or French Provencal.

Standing out

When creating murals and faux decor, artists work with different themes, textures and dimensions.

Jodi McGregor began decorative wall painting 10 years ago in France, where she studied art history and painting. In Las Vegas she has experimented with murals that incorporate moving and static props, an effort inspired by pop-up books.

In the home of Atlanta Braves pitcher and Las Vegan Greg Maddux, McGregor created a turn-of-the-century Mary Poppins-style "carousel look" in Maddux's daughter's room. She painted old-English countryside images stretching off into the distance, accented by picket fences and pastoral themes.

To enhance the idea, she created an actual wooden, white-picket fence as the bed's headboard and hung a wicker passenger basket beneath a hot-air balloon that she painted on the bedroom ceiling.

On two connecting walls of the room, she painted a colorful carousel that extends onto an actual wooden platform that replicates a carousel and serves as a base for a usable rocking horse. On another wall, a decorated and operational wooden swing hangs from a tree painted on the wall.

"A mural should take you where you want to go," McGregor said, clutching a portfolio thick with photographs of the trompe l'oeil paintings and murals that she has created for commercial and residential properties.

"A mural should create a mood or a feeling. For some people it's something they relate to, a favorite memory. Maybe someone grew up on a beach, so they want a seascape. Some people go with the decor of their home.

"The other thing a mural should do is solve a problem that can't be done with anything but paint."

A few years ago McGregor was hired by a client in St. George, Utah, to paint a Mexican-theme design on a dirty cement wall that encompassed the client's backyard. The mural's theme, the client told McGregor, was to remind her of a trip to Mexico she had taken years prior with girlfriends.

Faux bricks were painted onto the bland cement walls, as was bougainvillea that cascaded over its edges. McGregor painted windows looking into the Mexican countryside and iguanas on ledges. In turn, the woman landscaped her yard to complement the walls, creating a pathway that led to a painted door.

"That (trip) was one of the best memories of her life," McGregor said. "She wanted to surround herself with the best memories."

Pointing to before-and-after pictures of other backyard projects and awkward interior hallway walls, she said, "Paint can fix so much misery. It really can."

Decorative designs

But murals can easily cost thousands of dollars, and some people are apprehensive when it comes to hiring someone to paint their walls, Victoria Morgan, of V.A. Morgan Interior Design in Las Vegas, said.

Even muralists emphasize the importance of hiring someone with a telling portfolio and fine-arts background.

"For original art, you want to hire someone with some mileage on them," Dwain Seppala, an artist, designer and muralist, said. "You want that person of culture and education and fine taste."

Many people in Las Vegas try to mimic in their homes what they see in casinos, which is something that doesn't always translate well into residential rooms, Morgan said.

"Murals in themselves are not good," she added. "It depends on the quality of design and how it works with the place.

"There's a lot of huge awkward spaces created in these houses around here. Builders and architects are enraptured with the idea of creating casino-like space. You can balance that artistically with two dimensional (accents)."

For example, in a high-ceilinged dining room with three-dimensional beveled corners, Morgan worked with Humber, who painted borders on the walls and a medallion in the center of the ceiling.

Originally, she said, "(The room) had a lot of volume. It was very tall. But it didn't feel intimate."

By painting the walls and ceiling, the ceiling appeared to be lower, thus balancing out the room, she said.

Conversely, murals and wall paintings rich in depth and linear perspective can also open up an enclosed room by making it appear larger through scenery and trompe l'oeil.

"Mural painting isn't about hanging a large painting on a wall," Roark said. "It's about perspective. It's about depth. With a painting, it ends with a (frame). But what we do, you actually live in it.

"It's about living unique and living in the environment you want to live in."

By faux finishing and mural painting, Roark has turned her living rooms into palaces. She's painted jungle and forest trees in such homes as that of celebrities Siegfried & Roy.

She also teaches students at her studio how to paint murals. The 120-hour six-week course is designed for artists who want to build a portfolio, and non-artists who want to paint murals that they can install in their home.

Eight-by-8-foot depictions of the Taj Majal, forests and winding pathways into tropical exotica line Roark's studio.

Per her clients' requests, Roark alternates between painting the murals directly onto walls and painting on hard plastic that can be installed. Clients who have the murals installed always have the option of taking the mural with them when they move to a new home, Roark said.

After interviewing 10 local muralists, Summerlin resident Felicia Abdo hired Roark to paint her children's rooms.

In Abdo's 2-year-old daughter's room, Roark two years ago painted a faux-curtain headboard and a faux window that looks out onto an imaginary scene filled with Beatrix Potter-style storybook characters.

Abdo's 6-month-old son's room sports a race track and three-dimensional race cars that trail across two of the room's walls, which Roark painted this summer.

"It will last for years and years," Abdo said. "I didn't want to do anything too cartoony because they'll be out of that in a couple of years."

Wallpaper was never an option when decorating the rooms, said Abdo, who is also having Roark marbleize columns in her dining room and paint a mural in her bathroom.

Murals, she said, are "more personalized."

"It's different than painting the walls white or putting up wallpaper. You can take a theme from a children's book and totally do up your own room. You can't get that effect with wallpaper."

archive