Tag: flower mural

How Mural Painting Can Be Exhilarating and Too Much At the Same Time: Tuning into my Nervous System and Re-evaluating my Work Process

Posted on by natashamayplatt

I was recently blessed and overjoyed to be invited to paint a mural in downtown St Louis for the Delmar Loop Mural Festival (summer 2025). I got the call out of the blue from the curator, a lovely human with whom I discovered so many shared experiences as we got to know each other.

This is the reason I love mural painting—it’s a magical life full of surrender and trust and serendipity. I never know when or where or how my next project will come into being, and once a project does become manifest, I usually find layered connections and webs of meaning so intricate I could have never planned it better.

A Project That Pushed Me

The mural in St Louis was beautiful in just this way—besides forming a deep connection with the project curator, I got to spend time with a very dear friend from my early 20s who now lives in St Louis, introduce her to my assistant from Chicago, and we all connected so well as a group that we are planning an international trip together.

But was the mural that easy and serendipitous to paint?

A hard no!! This project, more than any other recent project, made me question everything about my process. I’m ready and honest enough with myself to consider that maybe I’ve been doing everything in the hardest way possible—and maybe it’s time to change everything.

Every single thing—from how I sketch the design on the wall, to the type of paint I use, to even my style and the technique of my brushstrokes. If anything, the journey of healing myself physically and emotionally during these last 3 years has humbled me and made me open and curious to re-evaluate every habit in my life.

During this project, I realized that the way in which I work comes from a dis-regulated nervous system, and I’m ready to change it!

Painting the Tivoli

The mural project in St Louis was on the façade of a beautiful historic brick building called the Tivoli. It used to be a movie theater showing cult classics, and now it is a church that pulls its congregation from across St Louis.

I never saw a more diverse congregation and people so happy and proud of their church. It was a wonderful energy to be a part of, from the pastor and his beautiful family who lived around the corner from the church and came to check every day on my progress, to the parishioners who celebrated each emerging flower and color on the wall.

The mural was big though, wayyyy bigger than I could tell from the photos of the building I received before I got to St Louis. 

 Right next to the building was another mural by famed local artist Cbabi, celebrating Maya Angelou and her work “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

I had the idea that on my mural, I would feature a magnificent bird flying free among the native wildflowers of Missouri, to bring that hope and prayer into reality. That meant that I would have to draw a bird that was two stories tall from beak to wing-tip.

And of course, because I’m Surface of Beauty, I do everything freehand! Uh-oh.

Freehand Meets Its Challenge

It’s long been a point of pride for me that my murals are drawn entirely free-hand, and it is a sort of beautiful dance and communication between me and the wall. Most other mural artists use some sort of grid/projection/AI glasses to get the initial sketch up on the wall, but I love the first day exploration of feeling out the wall in its physicality and imperfections, adjusting the design to grow around the odd AC vent or exhaust pipe, and making my flowers really grow into the wall rather than just decorate it. 

I’ve felt that this freehand technique is my hidden secret, which makes my murals come alive, grow onto the wall, and really become a part of their environment.

But on this project, I realized that everything has a time and a place. I was woefully unprepared to draw a two-story bird. As I was trying to trace out the spread top wing, I couldn’t even SEE, let alone imagine, the part of the wall where the beak should be. It was one full story below me.

How could I get any sense of the scale or the proportions of the body? 

I was shaking and sweating, and almost crying. Nothing to do but just keep going up and down on the lift.

Down I went—oh no! The bird should be two times bigger at least! Back up—is the beak here? Back down—Oh no, it should be at least two yards to the left.

Well, that was the first part of the afternoon. I will say that when I nailed it, and yes, I finally did nail it, to where it just clicked into place and was absolutely perfect, it was a feeling like no other. I stood on the ground looking up at the bird, and I had no changes, no comments. I felt a harmony in my body and the wall as if we were one, and it was truly bliss. And I love those moments more than anything else in life.

But at what cost?

The next day I was tired, and I worked slower, and I had less internal energy to make miracles happen. I slogged through a blur of petals and was grumpy with my assistant. And that’s when I realized that it’s not fair to my animal body or to anyone else around me to live perpetually on that wing-it, make a miracle high.

This is my job, my work, and the kind, responsible thing to do is make a plan and follow it. Even if that means using a grid to get the design up (for really big murals only, of course).

For the next 7 days, between runs to Lowe’s to get the super durable house paint that I use for all my murals, I re-examined my entire mural process with my assistant. Her perspective was invaluable. Together we decided that those miracle moments, doing the impossible and having everything click into place after hours of sweating and panicking, are indeed what makes my work come alive and have its unique power.

But those moments can be optional, for when I have the energy, time, and internal resources to make them happen. I can include a few of those moments each mural, on a particularly wildly unfurling flower, or a beautiful swirl of tiny buds.

In short, they are a luxury. But it is unfair to myself to expect every single thing I paint to come from that space. I need to have an automated system that I can fall back on for most of the days, and that other people can more easily help me with. That will involve grids, more highly pigmented paints so I have less work to do with color layering and shading, and more initial planning and color mixing to make a more systemized approach to how I use the color contrasting I love so much in my work.

A Turning Point in My Career

I think this mural was one of the most important murals in my career, because it marked the gateway from an entirely new way of working. And I think the end result is going to be much better.

For example, in this mural, I painted all the leaves on the last day. I gave my life blood to the flowers, and by the time the moment for the leaves rolled around, I had nothing left to give. I really didn’t. 

So between you and me, the leaves are a poor shadow of what I was hoping for. I think in my new system, I won’t waste so much energy in the initial days, and I’ll be able to get through the whole mural more easily and then make moments of magic happen in the end when I have the luxury to do so. I think it will lead to a more cohesive mural, with moments of true excellence layered on top of a base that’s already good enough.

And my nervous system won’t have to work as hard to keep up with my roller-coaster ride of panic and bliss hormones. I’m very excited to see what the new me will create.

Experimenting with a New Mural Style in Miami for Art Basel: Taking Risks and Making Mistakes

Posted on by natashamayplatt

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. 

The Unexpectedly Transformational Experience of Painting a Mural in Austin, Texas

Posted on by natashamayplatt

Destination: Austin

For about a year, I had the strong intention that I wanted to paint a mural in Austin, Texas. I asked my SEO team to work on positioning me higher in the search results for “flower mural Austin.” I wrote in my journal about once a week with the intention to paint in Texas, a state where I didn’t have any murals yet. About a month in, I got a surprise cold email inviting me to paint in Waxahachie, Texas, a small community outside of Dallas. I accepted and went to paint, but I still longed to paint in Austin, for reasons that weren’t quite clear to my conscious mind. 

About eight months later, I got a surprise email from a boutique hotel in Austin! The woman wrote in an excited and slightly apologetic manner. She mentioned that she had been searching for a floral mural artist near Austin and had come upon my website. Then she realized that I was not based in Austin! She said she loved my work and was there any chance I would be interested in traveling to Austin. Of course my answer was an immediate and emphatic yes! And, by the way, SEO works!

A Magical Hotel Full of Wall Art

When I arrived in Austin late at night and checked into my room at The Frances Modern Inn, the hotel where I was to be painting my wall art, I felt like I was at home. The aesthetic was exactly mine—there were murals by different artists on each floor. My room was decorated with unique, hand-picked antiques from around the world, combined with lush floral wallpaper in jewel tones and luxurious carpeting and bedding. Floor-to-ceiling deep turquoise velvet drapes shut out the world outside. 

The bathtub had fresh flowers on a wooden board across the tub. I immediately bought some Epsom Salt from the convenience store and settled in for a luxurious soak. In the days to come, over long exquisite Italian dinners with the inn owner and some staff members, I got to learn about their lives and build intimate relationships that truly touched me and inspired me. We shared deeply meaningful personal stories and I learned about the vivid inspiration behind the creation of the hotel.

Painting my mural was a chance to do my absolute best work. The wall was small, so I had the comfort and ease of painting each line with intention and even re-painting certain elements several days—which requires a luxury of time that I rarely have in my larger murals. I felt supported and nourished by the guests, the delicious food, the staff, and my gorgeous room. It was truly a treat. However, looking back on the experience almost a year later, I see that my trip to Austin changed the course of my life in an unexpected and profound way.

Unexpected Healing through my Mural Art Destination

I had been recommended by someone in New York to visit a very special healer while I was in Austin. He wrote an introductory email and set me up with an appointment. This healer uses the Network Spinal method, which is a very subtle spine adjustment technique designed to liberate the nervous system from emotional weight that has been stored up over a lifetime. My reason for seeking care was directly related to my mural career. Over the course of eight years painting floral murals, I developed a constant pain in my right hip from twisting on a ladder and using my right hand to paint. I highly recommend to other mural artists that they always directly face the wall on a scaffold, rather than twisting on an A-frame ladder. I, however, learned the hard way.

My first appointment was nice, but not remarkable. In my second appointment, a few days later, the healer passed her hands over my spine, and I felt a burst of energy rush up from my right hip to the top of my head with an incredible speed, almost like a champagne bottle bursting open. I felt light-headed from the force of the sensation, even though I was lying down. After the session, she asked me a few questions about my hip pain, when it had started, etc, and I suddenly started crying. I knew in all levels of my body-mind being that the hip pain had started on a particular floral mural years ago where the client had triggered some unresolved trauma from earlier in my life, by repeating certain behavior patterns and abusive ways of treating others.

After the appointment and in my last few days in Austin, I began to feel incredibly and almost indescribably sad. It was as if all the stored and unprocessed memories from long ago had been released out of my hip and into my nervous system at large, and my body now had no choice but to process them. I felt overwhelmed and almost overpowered by the force of these now re-surfaced emotions. There was no way but through, so I had to surrender and let myself feel all of the sadness and fear that was flooding my system. I now realize that my trip to Austin was even more significant than creating a new flower mural.

A New Mural and a New Inner Peace

I returned home and about two weeks later, the feelings reached a peak. I felt almost drunk with the intensity of whatever was happening in my system. Almost like my body was fighting a virus, I felt like every cell of my being was consumed with dealing with whatever had been released in the upwards rush of energy I experienced in that healing session. In that particular 24 hour period, I felt like I wasn’t in control of my thoughts or emotions at all– that my body was purging in its own way just as the body vomits uncontrollably to cleanse itself of an invader. 

I have never had such an experience before or after in my life. After about 24 hours of riding this wave that was bigger than my conscious mind, I felt it subside. I called someone from my past and told them my truth for the very first time in my life. I finally had the words, the clarity, and the calmness to express what my experience had been. It was surprisingly well received. It has now been almost a year since that event, and I have a lightness inside my heart that I carry with me every day. I struggled with low-grade depression for most of my life, but the astonishing truth is that those particular feelings of despair and lethargy unique to depression never come anymore. I live in a completely different inner world.

flower mural paining Texas

The calling I felt so strongly to paint a mural in Austin led me to a series of tangential events that truly changed my life. How everything happened feels mysterious and unknowable, but there was an undeniable and marked shift in my life since my trip to Austin. And I know that my mural will light up the hearts of others who visit that incredible hotel in the heart of downtown Austin.