SURFACE ARCHITECTURE
Mural artist Stephanie Boutari satisfies her hunger for creativity
Stephanie Boutari feels energized when art helps transform an environment; when it changes the mood in a place such as the previously dreary Goudies Lane alleyway in downtown Kitchener.
“It’s successful when it brightens up the day,” says Boutari, an artist who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture.
“So many people have interacted with it. I feel like it’s a great example of public art’s positive function.”
Her colourful, geometrically patterned mural on a brick wall just off Queen Street, near the entrance to J & P Grocery, is a good example of Boutari’s belief that “with just a thin layer of paint, a building volume can look heavier or lighter, larger or smaller, still or in motion, fragmented or whole.
“It can tell a story, revitalize a neighbourhood, spark a conversation, or become a social landmark.”
There was a party atmosphere when Boutari and a small group of selected artists got down to work last summer on the Goudies Lane murals.
Boutari was in her element that evening, painting while a block party with live music was roaring behind her. She was given a free hand with her design. She mapped out the dimensions with a measuring tape, donned her mask and mounted the step ladder with a can of spray paint.
The handful of murals help to rejuvenate Goudies Lane, says Eric Rumble, who was programming and marketing co-ordinator in the city’s downtown development office at the time. Rumble, now operations supervisor at Kitchener Market, says more pedestrians use the lane, often stopping to take photos.
“I personally love the kind of stuff she (Boutari) does,” Rumble says. “I think recurring geometric shapes are interesting and the illusion of depth she’s able to work in the piece is really interesting as well.
“I don’t really think that anyone is doing
anything quite like that,” he says. “I would love to see a bunch of her pieces visible in different parts of the region.”
Today, in a 111.5-square-metre studio at the rear of a little plaza in New Hamburg, Boutari, 31, is pondering a future with more colour, more murals, more art in her life.
In June 2017, Boutari joined her entrepreneurial husband, fellow architecture school graduate Adam Schwartzentruber, at Boko design studio, which he founded. She had quit an unfulfilling, high-stress job in Toronto with an architectural interior design and fabrication firm that wasn’t challenging her creativity.
For Boutari, one of three children of Egyptian expatriates who was born and raised in Bahrain, off the eastern coastline of Saudi Arabia, art has always been her “favourite thing in the world.”
“I felt crappy about not doing art,” she says. “I was following more artists on social media and jealous of what they were doing.”
In particular, she needed a chance to express her love of colour.
“Colour affects me physically. It’s one of those things I need,” Boutari says. “I think colour affects your mood and emotions so directly it’s crazy.
“At the same time, I curate or edit colour. I don’t like too much either. If I’m interested in exploring form or shape, I leave colour out because it distracts from what I’m testing. Then I bring in colour to give it life.”
Hot pink or telemagenta is her favourite hue even though it’s probably “the most anti-architectural colour,” she says with a laugh. “For a while, I even had pink hair.”
Four years ago, Schwartzentruber transformed a former storage room behind a dollar store into a neat, collaborative workspace.
At Boko design studio, a large sliding door made with old barn windows lets in light that lands on scores of colourful spray paint
cans lining shelves on the walls. Desks and tables are filled with computers and tools, not the least of which is a large computerized cutter, a recent acquisition, at the end of the long room.
The couple, who married in 2013, has done some “crazy cool projects” at their studio, says Schwartzentruber, 32.
He designed and built a tiny house with in-floor bathroom heating for an owner who carted the 4.88-metre-by-2.7-metre building to a lake property near Ottawa.
He made happen client Rob Theodosiou’s idea to cut up an old car, put it back together again and install it in Theodosiou’s funky coffee roastery and eatery; no small feat. The sand-blasted and painted car is suspended inside Settlement Co. in downtown Kitchener.
Boutari painted the mural for Settlement Co. and for Matter of Taste, a café and coffee roastery, at its new Waterloo location where she also worked with Schwartzentruber on the design scheme, benches and some tables.
“Either it’s his thing and I’m helping or my thing and he’s helping,” Boutari says.
“Our dream is to have different disciplines share space here. At some time we’d like a licensed architect to be a part of the office. I have my master’s (degree) but there are more qualifications, multiple exams in order to be a licensed architect.
“We’ll all benefit from being inspired by each other.”
It’s clear the couple thrives on each other’s creativity. Schwartzentruber designed and built a small cabin on his parents’ farm where he proposed to Boutari. Today, the couple is gutting and redesigning an old house they bought outside Wellesley that is on the foundation of a former hotel. A heritage barn on the property was once a coach house.
Boutari’s outdoor and indoor murals are multiplying in spaces across Waterloo Region, starting with the expansive geometric design she created in 2014 on the exterior wall of the Bread Factory building in Cambridge, across from the School of Architecture.
Since then, Boutari has designed and painted at least 13 other murals, large and small, on exterior and interior walls.
For example, inside Thalmic Labs, Kitchener maker of wearable technology, one of two wall murals features an astronaut floating in a colourful space along with computer equipment, a brain, mathematical equations and names of inventors and visionaries.
Boutari began focusing on murals during her master’s degree program when, after completing the required courses, she felt “complete freedom.”
She decided then to take a turn in her education, at some risk.
Concentrating on something as seemingly superficial “as the two-dimensional surface, particularly with regard to colour, paint and visual effects, went against everything I had been taught to value in architecture school,” she wrote in a description of her thesis.
However, the architectural surface or “skin” of a building is as important as its form or structure, she argued in her thesis, “Second Skin: Painting Architecture.”
She found research that suggested “a lot of architects are afraid to use colour.
“Architects prioritize the form above everything else. I argue that the surface has much more power than we recognize it does,” she says.
“Through colour and pattern and shapes, you can almost undermine the architecture.
“I started to be interested in the idea – could I paint a façade of a building? Does paint count as architecture as well? Why not?”
She asked the owner of the Bread Factory building on Grand Avenue South if she could paint a large mural on the building’s 1,600-square-foot, south-facing façade.
The result is a colourful flash of swirls and geometric shapes that challenges percep-
tion on a building at the end of a street steps away from Grand River and historic downtown Galt.
“I showed a concept with geometric art and designed boxes that seem to go inwards,” Boutari says. “I scaled the boxes to be large like windows and I left material exposed so you can see the contrast, a dialogue between painting and art and architecture.”
She used $700 worth of cans of spray paint to capture the idea.
“The paint is its own architectural language,” she says. “It challenges your perception of the wall. The goal was to contradict the perception of the wall as a flat surface made of concrete.”
Boutari’s thesis work was featured in a solo exhibition at Design at Riverside gallery in Cambridge where her mural on three walls and the floor created a colourful, geometric space in which child guests were inspired to play.
In 2015, she spray painted a mural on the façade of a building at 800 Franklin Blvd. in Cambridge using the concrete block and brick as a canvas for sweeps of colour of various shades on a white background. It’s her largest work so far, measuring 4.9 metres high and 61 metres long.
The weather isn’t always favourable for spray painting outdoors. On one chilly day, she painted for two hours when the wind came up and snow began to fall. When her cans began rolling onto the road, she called it a day and went home.
Outdoor work may be weather dependent, but she likes it best. It’s more public and usually, “I come up with the art from my personal creativity as an artist.” She is sensitive to the neighbourhood, and in one case, she modified the colours of a mural because they were considered too bright for the surroundings.
She completed the interior mural at Abe Erb Brewing Co., a brewery and restaurant in Kitchener, while she was still working full time in Toronto.
“I have a high interest in design and branding,” says Theodosiou, president and co-founder of Abe Erb Brewing Co. and also of Settlement Co.
Theodosiou was very involved in the mural process. Boutari is a good listener who doesn’t mind constructive criticism, he says.
“She knew the mood we were trying to create,” Theodosiou says. He emphasized he wanted an old industrial boutique look with robots, part of Abe Erb’s branding, and futuristic details. “We have equipment there and a mezzanine and I wanted a steampunk mural.”
The striking, monochromatic mural inside Abe Erb Brewing Co. is rich with depth and illusion. The two-storey mural features quirky robots and cans of beer travelling on stairways that appear to go every which way.
Theodosiou also wanted a steampunk theme for Settlement Co. in Kitchener where Boutari used acrylic and spray paint to create white drawings on a black background that included flying inventions, owls in goggles and a train steaming along a high trestle.
“Both art pieces at Abe Erb and Settlement are centrepieces of what’s going on,” Theodosiou says. Her work is among the top three reasons cited by guests as to why they enjoy the establishments.
Theodosiou says he looks forward to Boutari’s development of her style, one that places her “DNA” in every piece.
“What I like about Steph is she loves colour,” he says.
He admires Boutari’s resolve to satisfy her hunger for creativity after leaving a full-time job in Toronto. “Now she’s taking a chance. She loves doing murals and she wants to be the best muralist in the region.”
At Matter of Taste’s new location in Factory Square, a former BlackBerry factory on Phillip Street, Boutari’s vibrant mural on the back wall captures visitors’ eyes as soon as they step into the large space.
Boutari collaborated with co-owner Dawn Tran to produce a motion-filled image with waves and a sailboat, a cyclist carrying potted flowers in a basket, origami birds, a cityscape and colourful origami-like shapes.
Boutari listened to Tran’s wishes for a mural that was free-flowing, bright and whimsical. She heard how Dawn and husband/partner Phong Tran like to sail and that sailing is the idea behind the business’s abstract sailboat logo. She heard how Dawn likes origami and how one customer leaves an origami crane when he visits. And she heard stories of the owners’ home country of Vietnam where the bicycle is an important mode of transportation on which riders carry everything, including chickens to market.
Then Boutari put it all together with a sketch that impressed Tran with how she’d listened and understood.
“It draws people,” Tran says.
Boutari is inspired by muralist MadC, born Claudia Walde in Germany, who grew from graffiti and street artist to become one of the world’s top street artists. She likes Hueman or American artist Allison Tinati, whose murals are described as abstract and figurative, beautiful and grotesque.
She admires the colour-infused work of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, particularly his circular walkway glazed in rainbow-coloured glass constructed on the roof of a Danish art museum. The panoramic work divides the city into colour zones as a viewer walks.
The political street art of Banksy, the anonymous, England-based artist, is less her taste.
“Mine is more decorative or beautiful and optical and they create depth and illusion,” she says.
Today, Boutari is working on proposals for murals in homes and commercial spaces. Among her projects, she is creating two large murals for Lot42, a performance and event venue in Kitchener, and she’s working on a mural commission for a Kitchener client’s garage doors.
She’s also working on a road mural for King Street in Toronto after having been selected by the City of Toronto to be part of its “Everyone is King” project.
The temporary public space installations will take place on 19 sites on King Street for eight months, she says. Instead of painting the mural, she is printing it on a special aluminum-based floor vinyl that is slipresistant and adheres to asphalt.
“I am basically creating the artwork on the computer to look like a painting.”
When Boutari isn’t creating murals, she experiments with her art – exploring abstracts, pattern-making, optical illusions and the relationship of colours to each other – with the hope of selling in galleries one day.
Her dream is to create a large mural for a multi-storey building that involves her input at the beginning of the design phase.
“I like collaborating with architects and bringing art to a building from its inception. I like the idea of integrating art into it on purpose.”