“You gonna add color to that?”
“Um, no, this is designed this way.”
That’s the exchange muralist Kate Lynn Lewis has every day she has been working on the new mural “The Real Wild Life” for the city of West Palm Beach on the west-facing wall of Duffy’s Sports Grill at 225 Clematis St. – West Palm Beach Cultural Collective wall.
The seafoam green mural with black-etched lines celebrates the unique flora and fauna that draws visitors across the country. It shows palm trees, fish, canals, boardwalks, and birds. The mural also nods to our iconic Art Deco architecture.
Lewis’s style has clean and hard lines, bold colors, and an emphasis on “impossible architecture” inspired by artists like MC Escher and Oscar Reutersvard. Her more than 60 murals are seen throughout the US and abroad, in and outside municipal structures, arenas, offices, restaurants, and residences.
Raised in Florida, Lewis spent many years in Chicago. She previously served as Google’s Artist in Residence for Chicago, designing artwork for technology companies and clients, including Disney, Starbucks, and United Airlines.
It is her first project for her hometown, and she says she is up to the challenge of working in the summer heat.
“I had been working every day for around one to five hours when the wall was in direct sunlight,” Kate says. “I went back and did it again at night. It was my workout. This mural has a vintage narrative feel. Everyone kept walking by, asking, will I add color eventually? But no, I intentionally designed this to be purely like a pencil drawing.”
“I was inspired by the old Palm Beach Post articles and art deco images I see online when you look up old Palm Beach. That was the overarching vibe I was going for with these archways and Art Deco fonts to pay homage to the human side of Palm Beach. Then the vignettes inside are the natural things I love about Florida.”
Kate moved to Chicago for 12 years to develop her craft but missed the natural environment, as Florida is the only sub-tropical climate in the continental US.
“We have that, and I love highlighting that,” she says. “My dad was a gardener my whole life growing up and has this beautiful property that I was born and raised on. I always asked him why he planted the plants he did, and he said, ‘I didn’t. I just left everything the way it was.’
“I rarely see that around West Palm anymore because everything is so well-manicured and intentional that I wanted to highlight the wildlife of Florida. I wanted to try something different, and this is also a new medium I’m trying. Normally, I do paint my murals. But this is a paint crayon that I’m using, and I’m sealing the whole thing up in the end so it can last a long time. It’s more akin to the kinds of art I was making growing up when I used to live here. After moving to a large city, my personal style changed significantly. Now that I’ve moved back, my drawing style has shifted to how it was when I was a teenager living here.”
Lewis has painted the Chicago skyline more times than she can count, but that won’t apply anywhere in Florida. What is really the essence of Florida is what she thinks about when making art for the public to absorb.
“I’m thinking about what’s relatable to everyone here and the essence of this area. What can I highlight that we all love about this place and can all get behind and create a community? And to me, that’s nature.”
Kate did her first mural eight years ago in Chicago. Since then, her work has taken off, and she is working all over the country.
“I mostly travel and do murals. I have stayed in many hotels for long periods and have seen all these amazing cities. I stay for two weeks at a time while I’m painting, and I get to know the community. I’m literally on the street in every city that I’m in. I meet a lot of people. It’s awesome. Now that I’m 35, I’m engaged. I’m about to start my own family, and I wanted to come home and start my family here where I grew up; that brought me back to Florida.”
Kate does a lot of big municipal projects and works with a lot of percentages for the arts programs, which are government-funded art projects. She also collaborates with Starbucks, Google, and Disney.
“During my experience of returning home and creating murals, I want to emphasize that while growing up in West Palm, I was always an artist. Throughout my entire life, I never met a living artist until I went on vacation to the Keys at 17 years old. Even after that, I didn’t meet another artist until I moved to Chicago, where there are many artists. Chicago was the place where I felt that being an artist was truly possible.”
As the saying goes, ‘Be the change.’
“Even my own nieces are seven and eight, and they say, oh, wait a minute. So that a girl can be an artist too,” Kate concludes. “But when you don’t meet people doing those things, you don’t have the experience of knowing. I like being out in the community where I can meet kids or see kids walk by and be in awe of what I’m doing; they get to participate in an art event. That’s really what drives me.”
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“The Real Wild Life” mural by Kate Lynn Lewis was sponsored by the West Palm Beach Downtown Development Authority (DDA) in partnership with the West Palm Beach A&E District, a centralized collection of inspiring arts and entertainment venues, art and history museums, galleries, libraries, performing arts companies, and art education institutions.