Mural, mural on the wall

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/06/2023 (1151 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Murals are trending; interiors experts explain why your home should have one,” began a story published in a decorating magazine in the summer of 2021.

The article went on to detail that online searches for “living room murals” jumped significantly during the first 12 months of the pandemic, a slice of news that probably would have interested Rachel Lancaster, if only she’d had the time to read it.

Lancaster has been designing and painting murals for homes, daycares, personal care homes and private businesses for close to a decade. Business was steady, pre-pandemic, but after the world largely went into lockdown in the spring of 2020, demand for her services shot through the roof. (OK, maybe she hasn’t painted a roof yet, but atop her trusty ladder, she has tackled her fair share of vaulted ceilings and stairwells.)

“My guess was all these people were stuck at home staring at their blank walls and thinking, ‘Hmm, what can we do to dress them up?’” says Lancaster, 36, seated in a Main Street coffee shop minutes away from the Rivergrove residence she shares with her husband and their two daughters, ages 1 and 2 ½.

Things haven’t slowed down much since. Lancaster, who is booked into November, is currently putting the finishing touches on an exterior wall for a veterinary clinic in St. Vital. Just don’t ask her how it’s going to look when it’s completed.

“I do everything freehand, and while I can tell you that animals and flowers are heavily involved, that’s about it,” says Lancaster, whose work has been described by satisfied customers as bold, colourful and whimsical.

“Sometimes I think I’m finished a section only to discover the lighting isn’t quite right, or that’s where a piece of furniture goes, blocking what I did. So yeah, I’m always as excited to see the end result as my clients are.”

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Lancaster was born and raised on a farm near Dugald. She would love to tell you that she pulled straight As in art class back in the day. The truth is, the junior high and high school she attended offered band and art as electives, but not both. And because her mother felt music was the more essential skill, she wound up playing the trumpet for five years, albeit “horribly.”

At the beginning of Grade 12, she informed her mom she was doing so poorly in band that it was negatively affecting her grade point average. Her mother agreed to let her switch to art. Even though she wasn’t overly talented at the beginning, she felt immediately it was more to her liking, she says, sporting a black top emblazoned with the slogan Rachel Lancaster Art.

Lancaster was 20 when she bought her first house, on St. Mary’s Road near Havelock Avenue. The detached garage was nothing to write home about. She decided to dress it up by painting a lake scene on one side. She was satisfied with how it turned out. Pretty soon, she was spending a good chunk of her spare time sketching this and that.

Following a series of “dead-end” jobs, Lancaster enrolled at the University of Winnipeg, where she studied human resource management. One problem: within six months of graduating, she discovered she didn’t “really like people that much.” That caused her to do an about-face by taking a job teaching fire-extinguisher training.

“I ended up quitting that job, too, and for a while there, I was living with my boyfriend in his parents’ basement, where all I did pretty much was watch TV,” she says. “After telling myself that was ridiculous, I went to the dollar store, bought a bunch of art supplies and, for a couple of months, taught myself how to paint birds.”

Around the same time, Lancaster’s mother bought a bakery in Oakbank. Lancaster said she would happily paint a wall mural there. Her mom agreed on one condition: she would get paid for her hard work. Lancaster laughs, saying that the project took 75 hours to finish, about six times longer than it would take her nowadays. Her mother held up her end of the bargain, mind you, to the tune of $15 per hour.

Admittedly blinded by reality, Lancaster remembers thinking the mural, which depicted a European bistro, was the “most incredible thing” she had ever laid eyes on. She immediately placed an ad on Kijiji, advertising herself as “mural artist looking for work.”

Wouldn’t you know it? A representative from Celebrations Dinner Theatre reached out, saying they were looking for a person to paint sets.

“They weren’t too concerned that I didn’t have much experience. They were more than happy to teach me, and if there was one thing I learned there, it was how to paint fast,” says Lancaster, who left that position after two years to strike out on her own.

She knows it sounds like a cliché but for her it truly is a case of no task being too big or too small. Working under the banner Creative Reign: Artwork by Rachel Lancaster, she spends as much time planning how to paint a 10-square-foot kitchen backsplash as she does a double garage door or the lobby of a dentist’s office.

As for what’s depicted, the sky is the limit, she says, from dinosaurs to daffodils to deep dark space. She primarily paints by memory, but if a client requests, for example, a koala bear in a tree or an animated character resembling Super Mario, she will consult the internet to ensure what she’s conjuring is accurate.

“What I absolutely love about mural art is that almost everybody has something different in mind when they reach out,” she continues. “If I’d never moved on from painting canvases, I probably would have ended up doing the same scene over and over again. With this, a person will ask if I can paint a giraffe or a soccer player, I’ll say, ‘Yes, of course,’ and then challenge myself to figure out how.”

Colouring book commissions

Lancaster no longer limits herself to nurseries, gazebos and feature walls. She took up sketching again when she was pregnant with her second daughter. One evening, while they were watching TV, her husband, an Asper School of Business grad who runs the business side of Creative Reign, which includes a line of Lancaster-designed apparel, suggested she convert her drawings into a colouring book.

Good idea, that. An initial run of 1,000 books sold out within a few months. Then, after she approached the gift shop manager at Assiniboine Park Zoo to ask if they’d be interested in stocking it there, she was commissioned to throw together a colouring book for The Leaf, depicting plant life on display inside the horticultural attraction.

Also, good news if blue and gold are the only two colours in your crayon box: Lancaster was recently tasked with doing a colouring book for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. The tome, featuring a celebrating player on the cover along with a host of game-day snacks, was released last week, in time for the Bombers’ Thursday night tilt against the visiting B.C. Lions.

To date, Lancaster has painted murals as far west as Brandon and as far north as The Pas. Does she ever take a detour on her way to the grocery store, to pass by, say, the Bridge Drive-In or the Burger Place on Main, to sneak a peek at some of her past work? Not often, she says, noting she is comfortable knowing that her renderings aren’t “exactly the Mona Lisa.”

“It’s disposable art, and if, after however long, you want to paint over it, by all means, be my guest,” she says, mentioning one repeat customer who has hired her to paint and repaint the same wall multiple times during the last 10 years.

You know that saying about how a shoemaker’s children go barefoot? The same goes for the offspring of muralists. At home, she did manage to paint a scene in their eldest daughter’s room, but thus far, a wall in the younger one’s room remains rather humdrum.

“‘One day,’ I keep saying, ‘one day,’ but with things being so busy, there never seems to be enough time.”

For more information, go to www.instagram.com/rachel_lancaster_artist/

david.sanderson@winnipegfreepress.com