Story by: Hannah Lang
Photos by: Will Melfi
It’s a hundred tiny paintings within a painting.
A punk rocker with a mohawk dangles a cigarette from his fingertips. A solemn-looking artist carries a fistful of paintbrushes. A pregnant woman waddles in a nightgown and slippers, hands against her lower back. The crowd walks in the same direction, each character painted in the same creamy beige, outlined in a cacophony of black lines that unfurls itself as pedestrians pass.
He doesn’t like to play favorites, but Michael Brown, 64, has always harbored a fondness for “Parade of Humanity.” Every now and then, he’ll trek over to the wall in his hometown Chapel Hill to paint over the graffiti of some rambunctious vandal, and he’ll add another detail — a tattoo here, an armband there. It’s his only mural that changes consistently — and it has so many details that Brown himself can’t keep track.
“Some of those things were suggested by professors and maintenance crew and students as they walked by,” Brown said. “It’s so long ago that I’ve forgotten. Although every single thing had its reasons, now I can’t remember half of them.”
Michael Brown is a muralist.
He has etched purple puzzle pieces in alleyways. He has slathered black and green on to the sides of restaurants and train stations. He has covered foyers in delicate baby-blue landscapes, brushstroke by brushstroke.
He is ready to retire. Sort of.
How To Paint a Mural
Thirty years of painting walls will get you in to a routine.
Breakfast on the road is a local motel’s version of cakey danishes and watery coffee. You check the weather, check email.
Put on the armor: white T-shirt. Blue jeans. Camping hat. A thick coat of sunscreen, three times a day. Worn-out shoes, caked in paint. Gloves — in the North Carolina heat, aluminum ladders will scald your bare skin.
Pack up the truck: buckets, ladders, brushes, drop cloths, old yogurt containers for mixing — everything accounted for to avoid a trip to the store.
Arrive at the site, spread out your drop cloths. Make sure that you have enough of each paint color, that you won’t have to remix any of them later.
Climb up. Put some paint on the wall. Climb down. Step back. See how it looks. Walk back across the street. Don’t get hit by a car.
Climb up. Put some more paint on the wall. See how it looks. Climb up. Climb down. Climb up. Climb down. Make a mistake — now you’ve wasted an hour and $2o worth of paint. Climb up. Climb down. Climb up. Keep an eye on the weather. Climb down. People walk by and want to say nice things to you. Say nice things back. Climb up. Climb down. Sweat your ass off. Climb up. Climb down. Climb up. Climb down. The sunlight’s growing dimmer.
Clean up. Store your supplies on site if you can. If not, pack up the truck. Drive home. Have dinner. Take a shower. Rest. Wake up in the morning and do it all again.
“I almost fainted when working with him,” said Livian Kennedy, Brown’s latest intern. “We were working on a pre-school mural over the weekend. It was only 11 o’clock and it was already 95 degrees out.”
Most days have the same physical toil in common. But in its own way, each day is different.
There are the days spent painting the sides of a barbecue restaurant in Wilmington, where he works next to the drive-through, inhaling car exhaust and listening to requests for pecan pie and “hawt daw-oo-gs.”
“Used grease in the sun in July goes rancid about 15 minutes,” Brown said. “So I’m out there smelling that all day while I’m trying to be talented.”
There was the day he watched a meticulously crafted military truck melt down the side of a veterans memorial in a summer rainstorm. He spent hours hosing paint puddles off the sidewalk.
There was one particularly windy day when he came close to killing a man with a 32-foot ladder and almost wet his pants as he panicked and shouted at the pedestrian to get out of the way.
“I mean, I didn’t…” Brown said. “But I coulda.”
It’s not the free-spirited life that you would imagine for a man who makes art for a living. But there’s no typical day.
“If I had a job at the post office, I might wake up with a real peace of mind that I don’t have now, with all these concerns about this very difficult thing just to make a living as an artist.” Brown said. “But I might, if I had a job at the post office, wake up in a really peaceful state of mind and be very disappointed in myself.”
Steamships and House Painting
He made up his mind to be an artist in 1959.
He was 3 or 4 years old when he decided to copy down an old-fashioned etching of Adm. George Dewey’s U.S.S. Olympia. His grandmother placed a tiny gold star on the page. He still owns that drawing.
“It’s a rather sad little scribble,” he said.
At Chapel Hill High School and UNC-Chapel Hill, he painted neighbors’ houses for extra money. He got familiar with ladders and buckets and the sun beating against his neck and arms.
He won grants and awards. He moved to an art colony in Massachusetts, then to New York to work for the Guggenheim Museum.
He painted his first mural in 1988 after moving back to Chapel Hill: a blue and black scene of the town, silhouetted against the night sky.
Since then, he’s painted dozens of the walls in his hometown — not that you’d be able to tell.
“I switched styles,” Brown said. “For the first eight or nine years, almost everyone in town thought they were getting a different artist every year. But it was always me.”
The phone hasn’t stopped ringing since that first mural, though it has less to do with Brown’s artistic talent then you might think.
“What surprises people about Michael, and what is a reason for his success, is that he’s very driven and hardworking about all the other aspects of making art,” said Brown’s wife, Roxanne Henderson. “Marketing it, doing the bills and the invoice and all that — he’s very hardworking.”
But with increasing frequency, Henderson hears her husband gripe that he’s getting too old for this.
“We’ve just reached that place, and our son’s grown,” Henderson said. “Why should he do everything that walks in the door?”
Saying ‘No’ More Often
“Retirement” is a loose term for Brown’s plans following his 65th birthday in February.
“You know, that’s the word we use, but I’ve never thought about it in terms of going out and playing golf or traveling the world,” Brown said. “Not at all. I thought about it as getting a chance to do some of my own ideas.”
For years, he’s fulfilled the majority of the requests and commissions that flood his inbox. Retiring is just saying ‘no’ a little more often.
“The idea that I am ‘retiring’ does not in any way mean that I am not taking jobs at all. It just means that I will pick and choose the jobs that I want and not chase every opportunity that I become aware of,” Brown wrote later in an email. “It means that not feel so upset if I do not get each job I try for. It means that I will not worry about rain days (or weeks). It does not mean that I won’t do those jobs that are interesting to me.”
He’s looking forward to spending more time in his studio, a renovated barn with electricity and running water, where he plays “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Law and Order” and paints less demanding works of art.
In his studio, Brown can show up past dawn. He can have a real breakfast before work. He can pull out old sketches and blow the dust off ideas too experimental for a wall in downtown Chapel Hill. If he’s lucky, he said, he’s got three good decades left. The possibilities are endless.
First, he’ll give the studio a fresh coat of paint.
