In these constantly fluctuating times in which we live, Jasper continues to interview artists, checking in on them and their work and sharing their creations and processes with the community. I got the chance to talk to local artist, Lauren Chapman, about the three-month journey she took to paint a mural on all four walls of her dining room.
JASPER: You’re such a wonderful artist – what first got you into art?
CHAPMAN: I’ve always loved art since I was a child. My family always called me an “artist”, so I never questioned whether or not I was going to be an artist because I have considered myself one my entire life. They have been very supportive of my love for art, and my mom even went as far as to signing up for adult oil painting classes when I was twelve.
JASPER: Beyond your family, did you have other important supporters that helped define your work?
CHAPMAN: After moving to Iowa, I had two incredibly influential art teachers in high school who always treated what I was doing seriously. Hank Hall, whose work I would compare to the American Artist, Cy Twombly, would find creative ways for us to draw like tying string to pencils as we attempted shapes from still lifes and blind self-portraits where we would stare directly at ourselves in the mirror and draw without looking down at the piece paper. This taught me how to connect my eye with my hand so I’m not simply drawing what I believe is the shape but instead moving my hand with what my eye sees and creating that shape.
My other high school art teacher, Brad Travis, made sure I could work with oils, going out of his way to find large boards for me to paint. I had total artistic freedom and painted with oil paint before I fully understood how the materials worked. We had several critiques each week, and I began to learn how to speak about my work and understand what it was I wanted to do with it. I would compare my work at this time to aboriginal art as it was vibrant with repetitive marks.
JASPER: So you studied art professionally then?
CHAPMAN: I started becoming very serious about being an artist in 2015 when I switched my major from Art Education to Painting after studying abroad in Italy. Taking classes in the SVAD Painting department I learned much more about oil paint as a material and the process of working with this material. I took classes from Pam Bowers and Jaime Misenheimer who were the most integral part of my growth as an artist at USC. I developed a much broader understanding of the process of painting with oil paint as a material and what mediums worked best for me.
JASPER: You say you’ve been creating art pretty much your entire life – how have recent events like COVID-19 challenged creating for you?
CHAPMAN: I was in New York City the week they began shutting everything down and started quarantine. My fiancé, Nathan Casassa, had proposed to me at the MET, and while we were taking engagement photos, we heard it was the last day they would be open. It was really crazy how quickly everything shut down and the fear of this virus settled in.
When I got back to Columbia, my work felt a bit pointless. I couldn’t get myself excited about what I had considered doing when I got back from my trip. I tried doing a large painting symbolic of COVID, but I ended up hating it. Although I’ve always felt this sort of judgement being an artist and not being an “essential” worker, I felt even less of a reason to be painting during a full out pandemic.
JASPER: Was this project a way to break free of that? Or was it an endeavor you had been planning on?
CHAPMAN: I was feeling my work was rather pointless. I was running low on oil paint materials, and a house full of family pretty much killed my work ethic. This seemed to be a good time to slow down and take a little break from my normal studio days.
Last August we purchased our first home, and we are still working on decorating the place. Having my mom, Tracy Howard, in town seemed like the perfect time to focus on picking paint colors for rooms since she is absolutely incredible at interior design. I painted the living room a royal green and our little library “magician’s cloak,” a deep manganese violet-reddish color. I want each room in the house to complement one another and feel like its own separate entity, and I always knew I wanted to do a mural in at least one room of our home.
JASPER: So why the dining room then?
CHAPMAN: The dining room is where we spend the most time entertaining company in the house. It is right off of the kitchen, and I’ve added a couch and two comfy chairs. I was inspired to add more seating to this room because of my grandparents’ house. Visiting their farm as a child, my Grandma Kay would always be in the kitchen, and we would all sit around her and talk for hours. They had a double seated rocking chair, and I can remember falling asleep on it while my mom, aunt, and grandma would talk long into the night. If I was going to do a mural in my home, I wanted it somewhere we would all congregate, so the dining room was the spot.
JASPER: Have you ever created a mural or something of this size before?
CHAPMAN: In 2017, I had a studio at Tapp’s, and Caitlin Bright came to me one day and asked if I’d like to do an exhibition. She said she was thinking something Alice in Wonderland inspired. There was a large wall at the entrance of Tapp’s, and I did my first mural on it. It was the entrance to the show, and the door was turned into a rabbit’s hole that one had to duck down to go through. Surrounding the door were massive snakes, stars, a rabbit eating one of the snakes, and the title of the show, written in a cursive style inspired by carnival writing, was “Wild in Wonderland.” For that particular mural I used acrylic paint.
JASPER: What was different about the experience with your dining room?
CHAPMAN: For the dining room mural, I decided to try watercolor. I did a little research and found that the original paint I had in the dining room was a perfect prime for watercolor – a matte coat which allowed for the watercolor paint to absorb into. So, for me, this mural still felt like new territory as I was using a material I rarely use in the first place on a wall instead of paper. I have never painted anything large with watercolor before. In fact, anything I’d done in the past had been on a tiny piece of paper. Since I prefer working larger, being able to do this mural in watercolor and paint life size anatomical structures, I now feel a freedom and new confidence painting with this material and will most likely continue testing its waters.
JASPER: There are so many wonderful colors and details in the paintings. How did you pick the theme?
CHAPMAN: As a child I lived in my imagination and was always pretending. You could find me deep in the ravines of the neighborhood creating characters and stories I told myself. Painting has become a way I can once again pretend and create narratives within fanciful realms. Since I lived in my own fairytale land as a child, as an adult I have begun to recreate fairytale lands, although in my oil painting series the characters within them have been much darker as dragons become symbolic for rape culture, snakes the patriarch, crying unicorns who know innocence isn’t forever, and jaded sirens haunting the seas. Each piece a whimsical character and landscape filled with tropes and symbols I had created as warning signs - what I’ve learned about being a woman up to this point. With the mural for my dining room I wanted to create something whimsical and calming - a place that reminded me of where my imagination took off as a child, outside, in the woods.
JASPER: Did you sketch the scenes out, or did you let it come organically as you went?
CHAPMAN: I am not a fan of making plans. I guess I hold on to this child like quality in that way. Nothing exciting ever happens if you know it’s about to happen.
I started on the right side of the door in the corner next to the window. I did a few different drawings, and then once one felt right, I continued on the Scientific Illustration path. The blue heron was the first figure. We have a pond in the backyard, and I’ve seen many herons scoping it out for fish. They’re magnificent.
JASPER: And did the rest of the mural continue like that? What was the process as a whole like?
CHAPMAN: I started with a little green caterpillar I had found in one of my favorite Alice in Wonderland editions illustrated by Salvador Dali; after that a butterfly; I painted over the caterpillar, left the butterfly. This is my normal process. Just jump right in and paint over whatever doesn’t work. I painted the eyes Saint Lucy holds in the painting by Francesco del Cossa and then a ton of flowers surrounding it. Although I wiped away the Saint Lucy piece – it reminded me of frescos. This made me consider the entire space I would be working with differently. Instead of painting one area at a time I began thinking of all of the walls as one composition and how one figure would react to another across the room.
For example, I painted the fox in the middle of the room. Originally, I painted her straightforward so when you turned to her, she was staring directly into your soul. Something about it seemed to break the circular motion of the mural so I wiped her away with water and recreated the fox on a hunt. The irony of the fox hunt is the rabbit, a Young Hare created originally by Albrecht Dürer, the German artist. The fox pushes onward unaware of the nice tasty treat right under her nose. I only worked on the hare once with plans to go back and work on her again. Alas, I abandoned the plans. This became a much bigger project than I ever could have imagined.
JASPER: It is definitely a big project! How long did it take you?
CHAPMAN: People always ask me how long something takes. I never really know because time passes by so quickly when I’m working. For instance, I would work a whole day simply on tiny lines within leaves on the magnolia tree. I started the project mid-March and finished mid-June. So, a total of three months with most of my weekdays and a couple of weekends dedicated to it.
JASPER: Would you do it again?
CHAPMAN: I most definitely want to do another. If only there were more of a market for murals, I’d love to make a business doing it!
JASPER: What would you say has been the most special part about creating this?
CHAPMAN: There’s a quote from my favorite book, The Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch that says, “If I could go back, I'd coach myself. I'd be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I'd be the woman who says, your mind, your imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.” This quote has really followed and pushed me through the past decade of my life as I continue to remind myself that I am deserving to sit at the table in all aspects of life. To have my own table, surrounded by something beautiful that I’ve created, I like to believe would make my favorite writer, Yuknavitch, proud.
JASPER: Has the journey taught you anything about yourself as a person or creator?
CHAPMAN: It’s crazy – three months isn’t much time, but it’s felt like an entire year. Doing this mural has been such a great experience. I feel like I let myself try something new, and because of it I have evolved as an artist. It can be hard to do as sometimes you feel stuck defining yourself as this or that, “Oh I’m an oil painter.” Now I can add experience with watercolor and creating a mural. I’m glad I continued creating during a time I desperately needed and decided not to give up even though it felt so pointless to me at times. It’s given me purpose and kept me calm when I feel like I could just scream most of the time.
JASPER: For creators who are also struggling with motivation or the feeling of creating being pointless, what advice would you give them?
CHAPMAN: My only advice: paint the walls! If you’re going through a rut of inspiration and motivation right now, I can definitely relate. These past few months have felt like a restart button for most artists I know, but also on that note a restart for our country, and the entire world! It’s a wonderful time to humble oneself and be open to learning. Educate yourself on the Black Lives Matter movement, wear a mask, stay home as much as you can, and use art as a form of therapy.
— by Christina Xan
Christina Xan is a writer, a doctoral student at the University of SC, and a member of the board of directors of the Jasper Project where she manages the Tiny Art Gallery Project.