So I was just starting out as kind of a freelance starving artist. I was visiting my parents in Utah, and as I was driving on the freeway I saw a giant structure going up, and it was a dinosaur museum, under construction. And I thought – at that point I had done a lot of theater scenery, I had done a lot of murals in people’s homes, but just a lot of fun stuff. But I had gotten good at painting at very large formats, very quickly, the local theaters all liked me because I could paint really big and really fast.
The painters had painted it white, and I was like, “You’re not going to do immersive murals?” And they’re like, “Nah.” [chuckles] And I said, “Can I submit some ideas?” So I raced home and built a little mockettes of what I would do, for them, and kind of pulled together all of my portfolio of large scale theater scenery and home murals, brought it back in, and said, “Give me a shot.”
And they said, “Well, you’re just a kid. We’re going to start you in the gift shop. If you can paint the gift shop, we’ll see what you can do from there. So we want it to look like a jungle, paint a jungle in the gift shop.” So I went and I painted a jungle. And they liked that one. They said, “Okay, you can do the little kid’s area. We’ll actually put some dinosaurs in there. We want you to do realistic, not cartoony, uh, dinosaurs.” So I went in there and I painted the dinosaurs.
And they said, “Okay, we’ll let you do the underwater area.” And this continued on for an entire year, and the funny thing was they were very smart because they were getting a whole museum painted for a very good deal [chuckles] because I was just like, “Can I do the next one?!” But, after a year I had painted this entire museum, it’s called the North American Museum of Ancient Life. Apparently it’s the largest collection in North America, and it has my murals in it, every single wall in the museum is all what we did.
I ended up hiring a friend of mine, and a couple of kids from the local university art program, and they went in, and they all painted, and we had a great time. It’s not the world’s most scientifically accurate mural, but it’s very bright and colorful, and really brings everything to life.