Page 30 - Reside Magazine Premier Central Florida

E ver since the first caveman or
woman drew a bison, people have
loved wall paintings. Amid the
remains of Roman Pompeii are
beautiful murals of leafy gardens
full of fruit trees and f lowers
while, centuries later, Italian Renaissance ducal
palaces were adorned with frolicking gods and
goddesses. Early American settlers preferred to
paint naive landscapes with pale, slender trees
and limpid lakes, but the Gilded Age of the late
19th century saw the walls and ceilings of
American mansions (as well as the public
institutions endowed by their rich owners)
decorated with bold, florid designs. Almost all
at large and smaller scale on walls across the US. Recent projects include “
featured pillowy clouds; the most enduring
mural trope throughout the centuries. Now, there are signs that murals are
making a return, with those historic subjects—with the possible exception
of the bison—being painted onto American walls.
The bar at New York’s Le Coucou restaurant in lower Manhattan, with
its misty, feathery trees, was painted by much-in-demand muralist Dean Barger.
“I want the viewer to get lost in the illusion,” he says of his work, which he paints I WANT THE
VIEWER TO
a dreamy moonscape for the Stable Hall music venue in San Antonio, Texas,
and some nebulous pine trees in the manner of the Japanese artist Hasegawa GET LOST IN
Tōhaku (1539–1610) for the newly opened Nami restaurant in Lake Nona, Florida. THE ILLUSION
Stephen Alesch of Roman and Williams, the design firm behind Le
to Italy and Spain. Now 71 and busier than ever, she has a broad portfolio, ”
Coucou’s interiors, says: ‘‘I hate those murals where every brushstroke is
screaming for attention’’—and Barger agrees. Instead, he uses multiple
diaphanous washes of very dilute artist’s acrylic to create his illusions, “so you
are never sure if you are looking at a lake or mist on a meadow.”
The day Anne Harris was fired from a job she disliked, her luck—and
her life—changed. It finally tipped the artist, a painter from her university
days, into pursuing the mural painting she had so admired on her many trips

from pale grisailles of gardens and landscapes to bold panoramas, with a
wide frame of art historical reference. She particularly enjoys painting
flowers on a huge scale; some recent pieces measure as much as 8ft by 10ft.
“I do love a stamen,” she says with a smile.
Among her projects, Harris has completed a dining room mural for a Dutch
friend on Central Park West in New York, where a vastly enlarged still-life in
the style of 17th-century Dutch paintings reveals towering peaks of snowy
table napkins and massive lemons, their peels curling down to the f loor.
But her most successful commission, for a Chicago private women’s club, was
based on 1921 black and gold lacquer-work screens by Armand-Albert Rateau Above: Anne Harris’ award-winning black and gold commission
for a Chicago private women’s club combines imagery from
for the Paris dining room of the couturière Jeanne Lanvin. In Harris’ version, a 1921 lacquer-work screen with forest scenes

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