Traces
Federales — Denver, Colorado
A carnivalesque mural for a strange season.
I’d worked with the Federales restaurant group through EN MASSE on several U.S. locations before this project brought me to Denver.
This one landed differently.
Painted during the pandemic years, the mural took the form of a giant carnival face: comic, grotesque, and slightly unhinged. Somewhere between celebration and warning.
There was something familiar about that expression at the time.
Federales gave me room to make a strange piece for a restaurant wall. I appreciated that trust.
Raw concrete is one of my favourite surfaces, especially for black-and-white work. Its natural marbling gives gorgeous atmosphere off the bat.
This wall had a protective coating intended to resist graffiti. It also resisted my advances.
The surface had to be primed with something exotic, covering all of the natural finish I’d hoped to work with. I found ways to build some of that depth back into the painting.
Alternating layers of off-white paint and watered-down black produced stains and drips. It was slower than working in black line alone, but the surface gradually took on the worn, unstable quality that suited the face.
Denver is also my hometown, though I’ve rarely been back.
This trip gave me one last chance to spend time with my grandmother, Nona Nell Trites — a sharp, funny, strange, unforgettable woman whose eyes were always alive with mischief.
A giant smile, laughing at the circus.
© Jason Botkin