Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Mural with a message coming to Pride Center
Artwork will be on walls of living facility in Wilton Manors
ArtServe and The Pride Center have chosen artist Steven Teller to create the mural design for a nearly 3,000-square-foot mural on the walls of The Pride Center and The Residences at Equality Park in Wilton Manors. The living facility will be the state’s first affordable housing community for LGBTQ seniors when it opens.
Teller, 30, now lives in St. Augustine, but he was influenced by his upbringing in Fort Lauderdale. When he turned 18, the aspiring young artist left South Florida to go to the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia.
He had an art-inspired upbringing. Being exposed to art and having parents who were artfriendly gave him an early start toward his ultimate destiny.
“My mom was an art history major,” Teller said. “She used to volunteer to come to the school and teach art history lessons. That was an early memory of mine.”
His style even had its beginning with a work of art that he saw when his family took him on a museum visit.
“When I was a kid, I remember one time we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and there was this one very realistic Baroque painting from the 1600s that represented super Realism,” he said. “That
“Mural art opens people up, especially when it’s at a scale that challenges the size of your body.”
Steven Teller, artist
painting always stuck in my mind. I remember that seeing this insanely realistic art and being just dumbfounded how real it looked.”
Teller said he is grateful that he had the opportunity to go to a school where a particular teacher gave him a boost in the right direction.
“Then I got really lucky and went to American Heritage School [in Plantation], starting in the seventh grade,” he said. “That year, I had a teacher who made a groundbreaking impression on me because of how he could
paint. I just really wanted to excel at art. That teacher always backed me heavily and encouraged my talent. He told me that I had a natural knack for it and convinced me to follow my passion.”
A personal style emerges
Teller’s style has evolved since his early exposure to Realism. While he still considers himself a Realist, he has put his own personal spin on the genre.
“I’ve always been hugely inspired by Realism painting through history,” he said. “Realism is a big part of what I do. But I describe my approach more as Abstract Realism, where I tend to enhance the colors and flip the color schemes around a little bit.”
Teller said his intention is to inspire good feelings and connections with the viewer.
“I want to create strong, positive emotional bonds through these harmonious color schemes,” he said. “I also add a bit of a graphic geometric abstraction through my pieces. I tend to add a lot of flat shapes and lines juxtapose the Realism.”
The trend toward mural art
Teller loves what murals do for public art.
“Murals are my main focus these days,” he said. “I started painting them around 2013. I would say that the call for murals has increased tremendously in
the past 10 years worldwide. A lot of cities are providing a lot more public funding.”
Murals, more than many other forms of art, are immediately visible to the public and have the potential for a bigger level of impact. That is one of the reasons he has a preference for the size and scale of the art form.
“There’s such a power to public art that you can really create a strong impact on somebody’s day,” he said. “I always want to try to do something positive with my art. Through the experience of painting over the past two years, I’ve definitely grown with my technical speed. So with that larger scale that I’m working with now, I have more of an opportunity to create that effect on people.”
There is a bit of mysticism that surrounds murals that Teller said intrigues people.
“Mural art opens people up, especially when it’s at a scale that challenges the size of your body,” he said. “When that scale is so big, people often ask themselves how that is even possible.
“People love to watch the progress of a mural being created,” Teller said. “They like to have a romantic relationship with the process of art. It really is powerful for people to see how it comes together.”
An art process inspired by COVID-19
Partly because of COVID-19, the mural is going to come together differently than what most people are familiar with.
His timeline is that he needs to have everything painted by the end of September, but it’s going to be done remotely.
“The panels are going to be painted, then they’re going to be printed onto metal panels and installed,” he said. “This is a different approach than usual for most murals because I’m not going to be painting on these walls themselves. I’m going to be painting on panels where I currently live in St.
Augustine, and then we’re going to digitize them.”
The panels will be transported to The Residences at 2040 N. Dixie Highway where they will be installed.
Residents won’t be able to watch the process of the mural coming together this time, but Teller said it’s a needed adaptation to the COVID-19 era. In the end, he said people won’t know the difference since it will look like a traditional mural.
A mural with a message
Teller has a bigger purpose to the mural he’s creating for The
Residences in Wilton Manors.
“The most important part for people to know about this mural project is that I am an ally to the education and acceptance of the LGBTQ community,” he said. “There is a huge diversity of all kinds of people in society. I believe that people should be openminded and accepting of others. That’s really my main goal with this mural.
“My main goal is to create loving and accepting images that show happy, positive people,” he said. “I want to enhance people’s ability to go to the Pride Center and to feel accepted. I want people to feel the ability to blossom as individuals, and to grow with the community there.”