Artist Braden Walls has just completed his most recent artwork, “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder”, a 80’ x 35’ mural in downtown Jonesboro on 311 S Main Street. The site of the mural on the Roman Touch building, known as a beauty salon, is one that Walls has wanted to paint for several years. When the building recently came under new ownership, he reached out to them about painting a mural and they agreed. The owners wanted the painting to be about beauty and since the building is called Roman Touch the artist started to research Roman and Greek architecture and mythology. Braden shared a few sketches with the owners, and they agreed to an image of a deconstructed and reassembled three-dimensional portrait of Aphrodite/Venus - the Goddess of Beauty and Love. Walls explained the butterflies are also a representation of beauty and are the Arkansas State Butterfly - Diana Fritillary. “The checkerboard floor symbolizes both duality and balance and I thought added a nice aesthetic,” he said. Prior to this project he had never painted a surface of this magnitude, used spray paint or a lift. He painted the mural with MTN 94 spray paint and used the doodle grid method to scale the portrait to size. The mural took just under two weeks and around 80 hours to complete.
