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| A rooster mural by Lynne Rutter crows cockily at Gilberth's Rotisserie and Grill in San Francisco, CA. The hand-painted oil on copper leaf diptych adds down-home warmth to the industrial-chic interior of the restaurant, which is built in an old cannery in the city's Dogpatch neighborhood. Photo: David Papas |
" ... San Francisco artist Lynne Rutter,
who has made murals for restaurants, casinos and hotels, sees her work
as art. "People think of decorative painting as being somehow less about
expressing oneself and more about decoration, but this is not true of
many of us in the field," she says.
The award-winning muralist and colorist is passionate about historic
projects. "On the West Coast, there is a lot of creative reuse of our
older buildings, so even if the project isn't a 'restoration' per se,"
she says, "the period detail of a building can be celebrated in its new
incarnation, and decorative painting is an excellent way to achieve that
sense of history."
Rutter, who is inspired by the works of masters like Vermeer, Fra
Angelico and Max Beckmann, travels extensively, picking up ideas along
the way. "I collect images of ornament, or moments of great old murals
and beautiful surfaces," she says. "Recently, I submitted a design for a
dome based on something I saw in a beautiful place I visited in
Bulgaria."
Murals are an ideal medium for Rutter, who studied architecture and
design at the University of California at Berkeley before she opened her
boutique atelier in 1990. Typically, she paints the murals on canvas in
her studio and installs them on site. "This process — marouflage — is
an excellent technique for saving valuable time and allows for more
detailed work to be done in advance," she says. In some projects, like
the 900-sq.ft. ornamental ceiling mural created for the Paris Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, only the stenciling was done on site "instead of
working weeks on site, my team and I were only there for four days."
Rutter points out that decorative painting serves no one style, and
that's what makes the work interesting to her. "I have been doing this
since the mid-1980s and the popularity of decorative painting has gone
up and down over the years, but mainly what I see is a change in the
design of the work," she says. "The skills and techniques used are
similar even as the definition of 'contemporary' changes from year to
year. "
read the full article at Traditional Building Magazine
