Drive around the greater Chapel Hill community and you can find many beautiful displays of public art. That of course includes murals, which cover vast walls and hide in nooks and crannies.
One of the latest local murals is at Carrboro’s Even Dough Bakery, featuring a colorful rendition of the town itself. It was painted by Loren Pease of Sweet Pease Art, who has been creating murals in the community for over 20 years.
“Every project is a little different,” Pease said. “Sometimes they’re very specific. They knew what they want in this situation, she knew what she wanted and she has an eye and said, ‘this is more or less what I want.’ They sometimes will come to me with a drawing. They’ll sometimes come to me with inspiration. Other times they come to me and say, ‘I just want it to look pretty.’”
You can find Sweet Pease Art murals all over town, like the movie-goers bursting out of the sides of the Lumina Theater, the monarch butterflies adorning Yoga Garden in Pittsboro, or the “Welcome to Carrboro High” piece on the school’s exterior. She’s spent over 20 years putting up art around the community since departing a career in advertising. While things started small with baby nurseries, she said her butterfly mural in Pittsboro was a turning point in her journey as a public-facing artist.
Loren Pease’s monarch butterfly mural on the outside of Pittsboro’s Yoga Garden (Image via sweetpease.com).
“Everything I had done throughout my career was really custom,” she said. “And this was more or less one of the first ones where they said, ‘just gimme something beautiful.’ And I ended up doing a butterfly mural down there. It felt like it was genuinely a piece that I would do for myself, if that makes sense. And it also got some good press. People loved it, and it gave me the confidence to say, ‘all right, I can do things on the side of buildings.’”
She said that in the early days of her work, she sometimes found it isolating, working on a mural as life continued to move around her. To alleviate that feeling, and to help in all regards, she has begun to work with partners. At Even Dough Bakery, her partner is her niece, Tess Marino.
“She’s an incredibly talented artist, and I wish I had her all year,” Pease said. “She’s right now just here in between her traveling abroad and finishing up school. I just get her on the school breaks, but I definitely use her as much as I can.”
“I’ve always loved to draw and I always grew up surrounded by Loren and my sisters are artists,” Marino said. “I always had a lot of inspiration around me and being able to help Lauren on her jobs was a privilege from pretty early on. Because I had an in with someone like her and to be able to help paint the community so publicly the way she does, I find it such a privilege at such a young age to be able to step into a world like that.”
She said while she still has a lot to figure out about her own path forward, she will always be an artist at heart.
“I realized that the career aspect of it is a very different world than just the parts I love, which is the making of the art,” she said. “And so I’d love to continue doing it however that may happen. If that’s not as a career, it’s still gonna be something I do as a passion.”
As for Pease’s favorite piece she’s done around town, she said it actually isn’t any of her biggest displays. Instead, it is a series of little frogs that can be found by keen-eyed visitors to businesses across Chapel Hill’s Southern Village.
“That project was my favorite for a lot of reasons,” she said. “One, it’s a scavenger hunt for kids in Southern Village, so it’s like a multipurpose piece of art. Not only does it look cute, but it also creates an activity for parents and their kids to run around and find these little characters. And when I was working on it, I knew I loved it, ’cause my husband was like, ‘you would’ve done this job for free, wouldn’t you?’ I was like, yeah, don’t tell anyone, but yeah. It just creates that joy.”
And as for her future projects after wrapping up at Even Dough, she said she’s spoken with owners at Open Eye Cafe and Al’s Burger Shack, both of which already have Sweet Pease murals, about doing more work for both businesses. Before that though, she’ll be making sure her butterflies keep flying.
“When I finish this project, I’ll be doing a really beautiful barn,” she said. “I got a couple calls from that yoga studio that’s gonna be torn down. Several people have reached out and said, ‘recreate it at my house or recreate it in my, you know, in this situation.’ She reached out and said, I saw that mural. We love the butterflies, as well as the butterfly down on Rosemary Street. Said that they wanted some pollinators on the side of their barn. So I’ll be doing that one.
She said she hopes each one of her pieces helps brighten the community in its own way.
“My goal is to evoke joy in my target audience’s day.,” she said. “And as they walk by my piece of art, if it brings a smile or evokes some sort of joy in their being, then I feel like it’s a total win.”
Featured image via Henry Taylor/Chapel Hill Media Group
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