The Church approached me about painting a cafe scene for a coffee bar that they were planning to put in the old sanctuary.  They wanted it to look like an old nostalgic european store front.  They also wanted to vent the upper part of the room behind the wall so they also wanted windows.  I looked to Italy for the  visual information and influence.  This came naturally since I have spent about 5 months in Venice.

      Instead of just painting the wall to look like a building, I wanted it to feel like a building.  I cut bricks into the wall with a box cutter, which made piles of dry wall chips.  I then took the dry wall chips and mixed them with joint compound and piled it on top of the bricks, to give the brick texture an aged look.  I then painted the bricks (which were white up to this point).   To make the bricks look like they were behind old plaster that was peeling and flaking off I plastered pieces of paper to the wall slightly over sections of the bricks and slathered the sheets with joint compound.   I also cut the corner bricks out of 1/4 in drywall and pasted them on to the wall and then added texture.  These are the white stones that go up and down the center area of the mural. I also applied this technique to the base stones and the arch stones.  I then framed in the windows, built the balconies and painted the wall with various washes on top of a plaster texture with which I had covered the walls.  I built the window frames which are on hinges so they can be adjusted.  

     I built the counter for the bar out of aged walnut and cherry which I planed down.  I wrapped walnut around the existing pine plank which had served the purpose as a counter up until this point.  I framed in planks of walnut with painted pine for the area under the counter.  There are also thin strips of walnut that wrap around the inside of the opening.

      I then painted two scenes to give the illusion of a real space not just a facade.  One is inside of the arch and the other in the right corner.  The cafe scene on the right was informed by a picture a Venetian friend had taken for me, with the purpose of me using it for this mural.  The painting inside of the arch is a scene of a rug store in Venice.  

     The mural is about 40 ft wide and 20 ft tall.