Portraits are small and intimate. A twelve-foot wall is neither of those things, and I am learning that the hard way.
Volunteered several weeks ago to paint a mural for our church’s newly renovated nursery, a genuinely exciting project I said yes to almost immediately given how much I love this specific community and how happy I was to contribute something more permanent than my usual volunteer efforts, and I am now, several weeks into actually attempting the work, discovering that painting at mural scale requires a genuinely different skill set than the small, intimate portrait work I actually have real experience with, a gap I did not fully anticipate when I enthusiastically volunteered for this project in the first place.
My usual portrait work happens on canvases rarely larger than two feet across, close, careful, detailed work where I can see an entire composition at once from a normal viewing distance and make fine adjustments with small, precise brush movements. This mural, twelve feet across the nursery’s longest wall, requires an entirely different physical and creative approach, working from considerable distance to properly judge proportion and composition, using brushes and techniques I have genuinely never needed for any of my portrait commissions, and constantly climbing up and down a step ladder simply to check whether what I am painting up close actually reads correctly from the room’s normal viewing distance below.
I spent most of this week’s session simply fighting the scale itself rather than making the kind of genuine creative progress I had originally hoped for, repainting the same section of sky three separate times because what looked correct from two feet away, brush in hand, looked entirely wrong once I climbed down and actually stepped back to view it properly from across the room. This is, I am realising, an entirely different kind of skill from anything my portrait work has taught me, and I am having to genuinely relearn some fairly basic compositional instincts I thought I already had solidly mastered.
A friend from church who does considerably more large-scale decorative painting professionally stopped by yesterday to offer some genuinely useful advice, watching me struggle with exactly this specific problem for a good twenty minutes before gently suggesting I try working with a long-handled brush from ground level rather than constantly climbing the ladder to work up close, a genuinely simple adjustment that immediately improved my ability to judge proportion correctly without the constant, exhausting climbing up and down that had been eating most of my actual painting time.
I think there is something genuinely humbling, in a good way, about volunteering for a project that turns out to require skills I do not already fully possess, a reminder that even after several years of steady, paid portrait work, I remain, in this specific new context, genuinely still learning, still capable of the same kind of beginner’s frustration I remember from considerably earlier in my own artistic development. I am grateful, honestly, for the reminder, however many repainted sections of sky it has currently cost me.
The mural itself, several weeks in, is beginning to properly take shape now that I have adjusted my technique, a gentle scene meant to comfort and delight the babies and toddlers who will spend their Sunday mornings in this particular room for years to come, long after I have finished this specific project and moved on to whatever comes next. I am hoping to have it finished within another month, considerably behind my original, admittedly overly optimistic timeline, but properly, correctly finished rather than rushed simply to meet a deadline that never mattered nearly as much as getting the actual work right.
A few of the other women in our congregation have started stopping by the nursery during the week specifically to check on my progress, which I have found genuinely encouraging even on the days when the work itself feels frustratingly slow. One of them, a longtime member who has watched several generations of our congregation’s children pass through this exact nursery over the decades she has attended here, told me she remembers the previous, considerably simpler mural that used to occupy this same wall, painted by a member who has since passed away, and mentioned how meaningful it felt to her to watch that same wall being lovingly reimagined by someone new rather than simply repainted over in plain, forgettable colour.
That conversation has added a genuine weight to this project I had not fully considered when I first volunteered, an awareness that I am not simply decorating a room but contributing, in some small way, to a longer visual history this specific space has apparently held across considerably more years than I have personally been part of this congregation. I am taking that responsibility seriously, repainted sections of sky and all, and I intend to make sure whatever I ultimately deliver is worthy of the wall’s own quiet history, not just of my own current, still developing large-scale technique.
I asked her, before she headed home, whether she remembered anything specific about the previous mural, hoping perhaps to weave some small, quiet nod to it into my own design as a way of honouring both the artist who came before me and the congregation members who grew up under her work. She promised to think about it and get back to me, and I am genuinely looking forward to whatever detail she eventually remembers, hopeful it might give this project one more layer of meaning beyond what I had originally planned when I first, somewhat naively, volunteered for what I assumed would be a fairly straightforward decorative task.
More from this author at Tinsel Vandergraph, prat.uk.