Art — and where you place it — is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.
Pam Breen looked at the back wall of her Ansley Park home and saw a canvas.
She and her husband, Jamie, commissioned Atlanta artist Joe Dreher, also known as Joekingatl, to turn one blank, white brick wall into a piece of art turning their elevated backyard into "livable space."
The result is a stunning 25-foot mural that features pink and green Caladium leaves and a bust of a Greco-Roman deity.
“It’s wonderful,” said Pam Breen, who serves on the Atlanta advisory board of SCAD and is a meat exporter. “We use this like a room and I have art throughout the house, so why not have it outside?”
Neighbors near Beverly Road have stopped to gawk. Friends have come by to admire Dreher’s work. Some want a mural on their homes as well.
“Perhaps this will be a trend,” Pam Breen said.
Pam Breen and the 47-year-old Dreher met at a fundraising event, and they became Facebook friends.
Pam Breen said she admired the work Dreher posted on his page, and when she started thinking about painting her wall, he was a natural choice.
For his part, Dreher had some free time and was looking for a project that might tide him over financially while he attended an artists' retreat at the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap.
“She mentioned doing a mural,” said Dreher, who has done other murals around Atlanta. “When you hear someone ask for a mural at their home, you usually think it’s going in a kid’s room.”
When they met to discuss the project, Dreher was pleasantly surprised.
“There aren’t a whole lot of murals on the outside of private residences in this part of Atlanta,” he said. “It was intriguing.”
At the front porch of the Breen house, Dreher noticed the concrete bust, with more around the house, and many plants. It was a recurring theme and stuck in his mind.
That, he thought, would make a fantastic mural. He took photos and Photoshopped them on the wall to get an idea of how the mural would look. Amazingly, the windows of the house lined up perfectly with the statue’s eyes.
“They say eyes are the windows to the soul,” he said. “These windows of the house are the windows of its soul. It was a nice, serendipitous occurrence.”
The project took about a week, with Dreher keeping people informed of the work’s progression through a series of photos on Facebook.
Jamie Breen’s home office gives him a close view of the mural.
Breen, managing director of Horizon Investments, said he trusted his wife’s judgment when she told him their traditional white brick home was about to become an artist’s canvas. Trees and plants provide privacy for the backyard, so passers-by may only see the upper reaches of the mural.
“You don’t know you need something until it shows up,” Breen said. “It was certainly not in my head, but it looks so great. It’s just fun. It’s like getting a tattoo for your house.”
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