Artist Larry Rich can turn any wall in your home into a masterpiece. He's been doing it for 16 years. From basements converted to undersea adventures to ordinary bathrooms suddenly surrounded by the beauty of Tuscany, the only limit is your imagination.
"Small stuff has never interested me as much as the larger stuff," Rich says, explaining his interest in murals. "It's a different approach, using latex wall paints to create art. It is a challenge, but I like a challenge."
Rich has painted murals for almost any room you could possibly think of, but he particularly loves to develop unique designs for children's rooms. He's turned otherwise ordinary bedrooms into fantasylands, filled with dinosaurs, dragons, castles, and princesses. He's created mythical forests and jungles so real that the animals seem ready to leap off the wall.
"Hockey and football stars are also in high demand for children's rooms, along with superheroes -- I do a mean Spiderman and Batman," he says. "Sport themes are very practical, because they can last at least a good 10 years before the child outgrows them. I know of some teenagers who still love those rooms."
Rich works with the actual shape and size of each room. He tends to do special designs in the corners, since they are usually dead space in a room, he adds.
"I've done everything. I actually prefer to do custom work for people -- I get the most satisfaction from my clients' response to the finished work," he says. "The ideal situation is to come up with a piece that satisfies their needs, which requires getting inside their heads, but also satisfying my needs as an artist, and fitting within my style. The mural is more personal when it's been custom-made for that particular room."
Some homeowners may shy away from murals, believing the time commitment is akin to the painting of the Sistine Chapel, but Rich insists that's not the case. The size of the room and scope of the project determins how much time he will need, but most murals take him only three days. Most cost $1,000 or less, but budgets are discussed in detail beforehand.
"If there's already a deep, aquatic blue on the wall, I can transform the room into an ocean scene in a matter of hours," says Rich. "That's the most fun for me."
Another specialty of Rich's is the ancient technique of trompe l'oeil, a French expression meaning "trick the eye". This way of painting (the earliest known examples were discovered in ancient Rome and Greece) involves the use of extremely realistic imagery to create the optical illision that the depicted objects are three-dimensional instead of two.
Using trompe l'oeil, Rich has created illusionary portals, windows and arches to fantastic Oriental gardens, island paradises and Tuscan vineyards. He's even designed believable faux barrel-vault ceilings and art cornices with elaborate urns.
Rich hasn't confined his love of murals to residential spaces, either. You can see samples of his work at Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, where he was commissioned to paint dramatic portraits of musicians as diverse as Oscar Peterson and The Guess Who. He also restored the decorative wall frieze in the Fort Garry Ballroom. The original dated back to 1912 but was painted over in later years.
Several nightclubs and casinos, including Pharaoh's and Canad Inns Windsor Park, display his handiwork.
Rich first broke into his current line of work as a graphic designer, which may explain why he's more willing to work with a customer's vision.
"I started painting for friends and family and it snowballed from there. I learned pretty quickly -- in the end, it's just paint. If you make a mistake, you can always fix it. Then, as you go on in your work as an artist, you learn that there really are NO mistakes -- just happy accidents," he says. "Some artists get very defensive when they're asked to do custom work, but I actually prefer it."
Rich's first love is still painting on canvas, but he is willing to customize those as well. Some intriguing examples of his mural and canvas work can be found on his website at www.larryrich.com
