‘Wait, is that real?’
Artwork wraps around east- and north-facing walls of Las Vegas home
It’s a splash of color amid a landscape largely devoid of it, countering the surrounding drab like a rainbow slicing through a swath of stubborn storm clouds.
Across from an undeveloped stretch of land on the city’s southwestern side — all sand and scrub and rock; faceless — there it stands, a one-story home with many stories to tell, visually.
Aesthetically speaking, it speaks loudly: Taking it in is akin to gazing through a kaleidoscope sans the kaleidoscope, said instrument replaced by the walls of a multimillion-dollar mansion awash in geometric shapes whose color palate answers the eternal question: what would it look like if a lava lamp had a baby with a box of crayons?
The artwork wraps around the east- and north-facing facade of the house and conveys a tunnel effect of sorts, registering as a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with a Tetris-like arrangement of cubes, diamonds and other abstractions of the mind’s eye.
Walk past the driveway full of high-end rides — a purple Lamborghini Urus, a Carbahn BMW M8, a white Corvette Stingray, a GMC Denali, the gas can that reads, ‘I wanna go fast juice’ — and take a closer look: The more you stare at it, the more it reveals itself.
This is the whole point according to the bluehaired, multimillionaire 30-year-old who commissioned the piece.
“You actually have to look into it and go, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” explains Brandon Bowsky, who bought the house in September. “You can’t just look past it or glance, you really have to look.
“I still find stuff all the time,” he continues, reflecting on the artwork’s myriad details, all this brightly hued nuance. “It makes you stop and actually focus. It’s kind of what it’s all about: looking past the surface level.”
But oh how those surfaces stand out: you can spot Bowsky’s home half a mile away — go ahead, crane your neck while shuttling down Buffalo Drive, it’s worth it.
In a city with no shortage of seven- and eight-figure luxury homes, Bowsky’s pad just may be the most eye-popping in the valley, adorned with one-of-akind artwork to the tune of $50,000.
“I wasn’t buying the house thinking, ‘I’m going to put a bunch of art on it,’ ” Bowsky notes. “I bought the house because I was like, ‘This is a great location, it’s a nice area, it’s very quiet.’ And then afterwards I was like, ‘We got something here.’ ”
A $2 million blank slate
“If you come back here to the basketball court, you’ll kind of get it.”
Bowsky strolls past the massive pool in his football-field-sized backyard, walking up a few steps to get a better view of the back of his house.
He bought the place because he has numerous friends in Vegas and as an avid surfer and snowboarder wanted to be closer to mountains and the Pacific Ocean. When he viewed aerial photos of the rear of his property, he saw a blank slate, a canvas in need of color.
“I was like, ‘Man, this is a giant area, what should I do here?’ ” he recalls. “If you imagine, you’re up here, and you’re looking back, and this whole thing is just gray and there’s nothing else there. It’s a little boring.” Boring?
Can’t have that.
‘Wait, is that real?’
Much of Las Vegas pulses with color: the neon glow of downtown; the bright lights of the Strip, all that visual dazzle meant to widen eyes and shrink inhibitions.
And yet, residential neighborhoods tend to evoke the opposite, shaded in the colors of the desert just outside their doors, lots of beiges and browns — earth tones galore — a tonal respite from the aesthetic opulence of the tourist corridor.
For Denver artists
Jake Amason and Megan Walker, who created the mural that adorns Bowsky’s home, the idea was to bring the spirit of the former to the latter.
“Part of the reason why we went so bright with the colors was that all the houses out there are really brown,” Amason explains. “So it’s kind of fun to just, like, pop and make it contrast against the rest of the neighborhoods.
“We used, like, all of the colors,” Walker chuckles. “We ordered almost every color that Montana spray paint offers, and we probably used around 400 cans.”
Amason is a longtime friend of Bowsky’s and also has done artwork on a pair of Bowsky’s previous homes.
He and Walker, who are also a couple, got started on the mural in mid-October and finished in late November, often working from sunrise to sunset, with some inclement weather in the form of high winds and rain extending the project by a couple of weeks.
Their goal: To conjure a sense of disbelief, to make you question what it is exactly that you’re seeing.
“We wanted it to be like a desert oasis — or a mirage,” Walker says. “So if you’re, like, wandering through the desert and then you come across this thing, you’re like, ‘Wait, is that real?’ ”
A public art gallery
There’s art everywhere here, from multiple black light/UV paintings to a large acrylic heart that Bowsky won in a charity auction to images of a deconstructed Scrooge McDuck in his studio.
“I’ve definitely got an art gallery worth of art, that’s for sure,” he observes.
And now the facade of his house doubles as a sort of public gallery, complete with unexpected visitors who happen upon the place and want to see the artwork up close.
“I don’t really mind,” Bowksy says. “I’m super happy to show it to pretty much anybody if I’m not busy, just hanging out and somebody pops by and is like, ‘Oh, this is so cool.’
Having recently scheduled the painting to get sealed, he hopes it will last around five years — and then he probably will commission a new one.
He says most of his neighbors have had no complaints with the artwork, save for a woman across the street who called it an eyesore.
That’s OK: That’s art. “That’s the cool thing about art: It’s subjective,” Bowsky says. “Everybody’s entitled to love or not love it, right?”