Paint Saint Louis 2023

This body of work was photographed during the 2023 Paint St. Louis mural project and represents a more exploratory phase of engagement with the floodwall environment. The images reflect an initial impulse to capture breadth—variety of style, scale, and visual language—before the work began to narrow toward a more restrained and selective approach.

Rather than isolating individual murals as discrete subjects, these photographs emphasize saturation, gesture, and immediacy. Color is allowed to dominate. Figures appear more animated, graphic forms more assertive, and the framing more inclusive of surrounding visual noise. The result is a series that privileges energy and accumulation over compression.

What connects the work, even at this stage, is an emerging interest in how public imagery performs when removed from its original context. Murals designed for speed and spectacle are slowed down through photographic framing, inviting attention to texture, repetition, and adjacency. Moments of humor, tension, and symbolism surface not through narrative sequencing, but through visual contrast.

Seen alongside later work from 2024 and 2025, this series functions as a foundation rather than a conclusion. It documents the point at which observation gives way to intent—where saturation begins to be questioned, and where selection becomes as important as capture. The images remain vital not for their completeness, but for the clarity they bring to the evolution of the work that follows.