Eighteen years ago, at her sister-in-law’s request, Genevieve Meek painted a mural of a car on her nephew’s wall. When the couple moved, they found they couldn’t part with the mural.
“They sawed the wall out and took it with them,” Meek says with a laugh, adding that it now sits in their weight room.
Nearly two decades later, Meek is taking those mural-making talents more seriously. A commercial artist all her life, she recently took up painting large-scale pictures again and hopes to make it a large part of her business.
Meek became interested in art at a young age. She tells a funny story about how, when she realized she couldn’t actually become a dinosaur for a living, she decided to become an artist.
“It has been an excellent second option,” she says with a laugh. Still, she says, it hasn’t been without its bumps – namely, she says, the commercial art industry being taken over by computer-generated work.
“It’s changed so rapidly from when I entered it 25 years ago,” she says of her field. She considered training in computer work, but think it would detract from what she loves about her creative bent.
“I love the experience of that feeling. It’s a strange thing to describe, but I just love the buttery feel of paint going onto a surface,” she says. “And there’s just nothing I could do on computer that would possibly compare to that feeling.”
And that’s one of the reasons why she decided to start painting murals again. But first, someone had to trust her with one. Enter Meek’s church, the Fifth Church of Christ Scientist.
About a year and a half ago, having seen some religiously themed book illustrations she’d done, church officials asked Meek to paint something in the children’s rooms.
That mural, an outdoor scene of a shepherd surrounded by his sheep, led to more work. A woman she went to church with saw the mural and contacted Meek about doing some work at her home.
“One thing led to another, and I ended up spending another six weeks at her house,” Meek says. “She had a lot of real fun and exciting ideas.”
In one of her client’s sons’ rooms, Meek painted a hockey goal at either end of the room, with a cheering crowd on a wall in-between and a scoreboard in a recessed area in the ceiling. Meek included the family’s images in the cheering crowd.
“My favorite thing is to do something like that,” she says of that project and others in the house. “It’s just so magical. It creates a whole other thing other than what’s already there.”
Though her mural work still only takes up about half of her workload, Meek says she’d like it to become a full-time gig.
“It’s really just the same,” she says of painting murals. “It’s got all the same principles – design, color, everything you learn in art school – just bigger.
“It’s definitely messier,” she says, laughing. “Which is kind of fun.”
Though most of her work has been done in children’s rooms to this point, she doesn’t want to limit herself.
“I would just love to be busy painting,” she says. “I want to do artwork, and this is an opportunity for me to do artwork on a different level, in a different way. It’s something I’ve always wanted from the time I was really little.
“After all these years, it still has that magic for me.”
