Blank Slate

ERICA NELSON says she didn’t have a hometown growing up. So, she’s trying to create one and using the Wilmington area as her canvas. Her very big canvas.

Nelson owns Mural Modern, which creates what its website calls high-quality murals and installations for businesses looking to expand and capitalize on their social media presence.

“Cause’ if there’s no photo, did it really happen?” the website asks.

Nelson’s dad was a highly sought-after builder in Connecticut, so she and the family moved every time he bought a house to renovate. While they lived in some great spaces, Nelson didn’t feel like she had roots.

She left home to live with relatives and attended the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Here, she copied masters’ works, including those of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, the surrealist painter whose work she loved.

More recently, she was living in Santa Barbara, California when she met her husband, a civil engineer who lived in San Francisco. Once married, his job took the couple to Louisiana, where Nelson had an art studio, worked for an artist, and taught art.

Then Nelson’s husband took a job in Wilmington, and in 2020 he started to work with Balfour Beatty.

Nelson set about trying to find a home for her art and founded Mural Modern last February. Her first client was Amplifly Cycle & Strength in Porters Neck.

In a YouTube endorsement of Nelson and Mural Modern, owner Ali Nyquist said she shared her vision of what she wanted for her business, and Nelson immediately got to work to create art that would meet that vision.

One of the walls has been converted to a painting of a giant black stereo and another room has Southwest-inspired scenery complete with canyons, cacti, and a steer skull.

Nyquist praised Nelson’s attention to detail and creativity, saying, “Every single person who walks into our studio is just blown away by her work.”

Starting with a pen, pencil, and ink, Nelson draws the components of the design she’s creating.

If it’s a digital installation, rather than drawing on the surface where the art will finally be located, such as a wall, she draws it on paper and scans the image.

She makes vectors, or mathematical lines and curves, that can be reduced or enlarged in size without any loss in image quality. Depending on the job, she will add watercolors or other artistic components. These are then printed on vinyl and installed.

At Amplifly, some of Nelson’s work was digital and the rest, hand-done. Mural Modern also offers custom supplemental marketing materials such as coloring books and stickers.

“I’m not just creating a mural,” she says of the experience. “If a business is investing in me, I think I should be offering as much as I can.”

She says she started working with digital installations in Louisiana, where there was often flooding. So that gorgeous piece of art hand-painted on a wall? Drenched, moldy, and irretrievable, probably.

One of her Louisiana clients, a church, had had a flood, so when they decided to get a mural, they had a digital installation.

As someone who moved a lot as a child, Nelson realizes it makes sense to create something that if it can’t come with you, it can be replicated digitally.

“I really want to offer my clients the product that will leave them options in the long-term,” she says.

Nelson’s interest in learning, in general, and art, specifically, goes way back.

When she was a child, her parents and their friends would suggest she draw a lion when in fact, she was already drawing Disney characters. She studied architecture and graphic design.

Her art, she says, focuses on the space it will fill, rooting it in truth and history, making sure it fits in with and becomes part of the community.

She recently painted a mural in the new Panacea Brewing Company location of its trademark yellow VW van, a “Boochbus” with wings.

The Boochbus was created for Panacea’s single-use kombucha bottle labels, which Nelson then interpreted into her art.

Nelson is also branching out to work with other subcontracted artists, as well as with students.

“Hiring other artists, or providing jobs, is a very important part of my business,” Nelson says. “I believe in teamwork, and working with others produces a better product.”

Teaching and mentoring are the other side of building the business, she says.

“I am learning the business portion every day, and pushing through is only worth the struggle, because of where my heart lies, which is forging a path for others in Wilmington who wish to pursue a career in the mural arts, the visual storytelling,” she says.

She’s really interested in Wilmington’s history and envisions the opportunity to express it artistically in public spaces in the city.

Nelson is the professional advisor on a grant-funded project that involves four University of North Carolina Wilmington students and a couple of high school volunteers designing and installing three full hallways of murals at the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The theme of the project is “Waves of Innovation” and will depict downtown Wilmington, Wrightsville Beach, and UNCW.

Nelson says the project, which is the brainchild of CIE manager Laura Brogdon-Primavera, will provide the students with valuable work experience that will help them decide if they want to pursue an art career.

It will also teach them the fundamentals of the design and installation process. The mural will be revealed in May.

In speaking of murals, Nelson says today there’s so much emphasis on the “self,” meanwhile the murals’ purpose is on the viewer, to make them feel, experience, or learn something. It’s part salvage, part remembrance.

“If you throw away the old, then it’s gone forever. You could change without abandoning,” she says. “It humbles me to really think about what we do. I was born to do this. It’s so hard and I quit every other day and you have a little thing that will happen and it reminds me of why I do it.”

To view more of photographer Michael Cline Spencer’s work, go to michaelclinephoto.com.

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