It was a goal of mine to paint in Miami during Art Basel 2023, and just a week before Art Basel started, I hadn’t heard back from any of the projects I had applied to. Then my phone rang a few days before the festivities started, while I was on the beach in Mexico, and I knew I was going to be on the next flight to Miami.I didn’t have much time to prepare my design, but I had one of the strongest visions I’ve ever had for a mural. I saw a bright, tropical, and very bold, modern mural—all the qualities of Miami. So I decided I would try a color-blocking technique I had seen other muralists do, and which I had been wanting to try for a long time. I had a beautiful pair of walls as my mural canvas, and almost complete freedom when it came to design, so I decided this was the moment!

Color Blocking for the First Time

The look I envisioned for the mural was lines of bold bright color traversing the mural at geometric angles, and changing the color of any element they crossed along the way.  For example, if I had several yellow flowers in the mural, and a bright pink line crossed that part of the mural, the yellow of the flowers would change to orange (pink + yellow) within the confines of the line. 

Then if the pink line continued its path, hitting some green leaves next, the green of those leaves would change to purple (pink + green) within the line.

 If you are wondering how I got orange from pink + yellow, you are entering the slightly frantic headspace I was during the entire mural process.  Does pink + yellow make orange?  Or does it make a lighter pink?  Does pink + green make purple?  Or does it make brown, which would look horrible?  With my usual “more is more” style, I decided to pick bright color that I thought would look good in these intersections, and not worry too much about the laws of color theory.

The Chaos of Art Basel, Plus Having to Draw Straight Lines

So the plan was to paint two complete two-story buildings in six days. With all the Art Basel traffic, I averaged about 2 hours to get from the only available Airbnb left in Miami down to the mural location in Overtown, near Wynwood. I wasn’t able to fly my assistant down from NY, as flights were 20x more expensive than usual. And all the paint stores in Miami were running out of spray paint.

So there I was, auditioning mural assistants I had found the day before on Craiglist, while I was trying to figure out how to paint a color-blocked mural fast enough to cover an entire building in 3 days.  It’s surprising to say, but this was the very first mural I ever painted where the background color was not solid. 

Usually I pick a background color, and then paint my flowers on top (with all curvy, flowy lines of course!)  Now suddenly I had a white wall, where I wanted a complex interplay of different colors intersecting and interacting, and given my 3-day time constraint, it didn’t seem to make sense to spend a day painting a background color which was going to be altered by the color-blocking anyway. 

So I decided to start painting the flowers and the background at the same time, moving across the wall one area at a time. You can see my first day’s work in this slightly chaotic but promising little area done on the bottom left.

Problem one:   I forgot that this entire idea requires straight lines!  Anyone who knows my work knows that I always work free-hand, with no projection, measurement, or grid of any kind.  Well, I tried to do the same for this mural, which definitely needed more geometrically precise line-work than my usual curvy florals. 

You can see my imperfectly sketched lines in the work-in-progress pictures—no ruler or tape to be seen! To be clear, I am very happy and proud of how the mural turned out. It’s one of my favorites. But at some point in the process, I just decided to lean in to the “artisanal hand-crafted” nature of my work, and stopped even trying for straight lines. They are all a bit wonky, and I think that’s what makes the mural pulse with life. I’m just not an artist that does things in a measured and accurate way, and I don’t think I ever will be (or want to be).

Paint Troubles, and Mixing my Own in a Time of Crisis

Problem two:  I had absolutely no idea what colors I would use, how much of each color I would need, and all of Miami was running out of paint!  My poor Craigslist-chosen assistant started each morning at the Home Depot buying new sample sizes of different colors I had selected the night before from the online Behr colorcard (an invaluable resource!). 

I designed the mural as I went, and while I was painting the left side, I didn’t know what colors I would be using on the right side. It was such a complicated composition that I needed to see one side come to life in full-scale before I could decide what colors were needed to balance the other side.

On the last half of the last wall, all the spray paint stores in Miami were out of the Montana green I needed to finish my green line. I finished that whole side of the mural with a darker green, dusted with fluorescent yellow that I found, and somehow the yellow spray dust made the green look the same as the missing color—at least from a distance. That is the beauty of murals–we must always, always look at the big picture!

Painting murals has certainly helped me get over my perfectionism, and this mural more than any other. It was supposed to be my most precise, straight, measured mural, but it was the most chaotic and unplanned mural I have ever painted!

Cheers and Support and a Pair of Painted Jeans

The residents of the building were cheering me on every time they came out, and as Overtown has a large population of people experiencing homelessness, there was always a crowd watching my progress from across the street. 

By the time I started the second wall, everyone was won over.  People were cheering support as I drew the first rough outlines of the flower on the second wall.  One man shouted, “that’s the best petal you’ve ever drawn,” when I had only drawn a few messy marks to block in the outlines. 

It was such a warm and hospitable atmosphere, and it felt like people were really happy to see my art.  At the end of the mural, I finished my last cans of spray paint on one of the men’s jeans.  He asked me to just spray whatever colors I had left on his jeans so he could remember the process of making the mural.  It was an honor, as was the entire experience and the warm welcome of the community.