Imagine completing your first mural ever and then hearing that it’s currently the largest mural in St. Petersburg completed by a local artist. This is what happened to Tessa Moeller as soon as she completed her mural “The Divine Proportion” on the outside of the St. Petersburg College Downtown Campus building.
“When I moved to St. Pete, there was such a vibrant mural scene that I was able to secure one. It was crazy because I had never done one before, and especially at that size. There were a lot of logistics that I wasn’t familiar with, but I loved every second of it and would definitely do it again if I could,” Moeller says.
The winner of an open call for this mural location, Moeller found the windows on the wall to be an extra challenge ; other artists told her that they wouldn’t have accepted the job because the windowpanes would make it hard to create a decent composition. That didn’t stop Moeller. With high-quality exterior paint in hand, she learned a lot as she went along.
“I’m not a huge spray painter and because I wanted that hand-painted vibe, I didn’t even consider it. In retrospect, I should have used a sprayer to get more coverage because there is so much white of the wall. Of course, I’ve never used a lift before and I decided to start at the very top with the most detailed part of the face — it was such a dumb idea,” she says with a laugh.
“But mostly I started it like a normal painting on canvas by blocking in the figure, but once I got the hang of it I was just zipping around on the lift instead," she adds. "I didn’t line it all out first because it was so difficult to maneuver the lift and it was time-consuming, so I decided to go piece by piece.”
The mural from this Pittsburgh native depicts a male and female figure mirroring one another and reaching outward, rendered in a monochromatic palette reminiscent of Renaissance charcoal drawings.
“I love figurative art in general, but this piece in particular is based off Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. During the planning process, I met with the student government to make decisions from there. I wanted something that was all-inclusive of the human experience and togetherness, of mankind rather than one man or one woman. I wanted it to be simplistic in an elegant way so I painted the two monochromatic figures with the school’s colors included in it. The golden ratio is behind the figures further ties into the theme of academia with math, science, the humanities, and history. The mural really came together great since I was actually able to execute it how I imagined it to be,” she says.
Everyone can associate with the figure, but Moeller’s focus on the human form seems to stem from watching her father, Christopher Moeller, work on drawings and paintings as a professional studio artist.
“He had a home studio, so he was always working on projects around me. He did a lot of illustration and painted comic books for DC, Magic: The Gathering, and other book covers, so I was immersed in that as I grew up. Art was always in my everyday life, but at the time, I didn’t want to go to art school. I knew I didn’t want to go into illustration since art was sort of my personal thing, especially in high school. I never had the notion of what you should or shouldn’t do in art, so that was powerful to me. I didn’t want to go to school and be molded into something that wasn’t me," Moeller explains.
“As I was going through nursing school I was always painting, but I realized I needed something to allow me to grow. I got absorbed in the technical aspects of painting and fell in love with John Singer Sargent. Though I got really involved with the process of oil paints, I felt like I lost that inherent voice I had,” she says. “Only in the past year or so have I been trying to bridge the two together. All of a sudden, my work became more authentic and people tend to gravitate towards them more.”
There’s something to be said about the rawness of unique forms rather than having to render something exactly from life, which is something that Moeller tries to express in any series she works on.
“In any of my other bodies of work, I try to use whatever comes most organic to me, and that’s almost exclusively the figure. I want to convey some sort of aura, and for me that is most easy achieved through figurative forms,” Moeller explains. “As I go back to a looser form, it’s funny because I’m starting to see how I’m being inspired by my father’s work. It was just such a part of my childhood that it was just a fact because it was always there. I was comparing some of his older work to his newer stuff—I’m seeing his work with fresh eyes now.”
While recently working as a nurse in the burn unit at Tampa General Hospital and in St Petersburg, she has been making the transition into being an artist full-time. She has an upcoming Pop Up Art Sale at the Morean Center for Clay during May 13 from 12-9 p.m. (so make sure to stop by during Second Saturday Art Walk) featuring recently completed work.
To find out more about the Pop Up Art Sale: facebook.com/events/293251204437848/
To see more of her work, visit her website at: tessamoellerart.com.
Urban Dictionary defines Femme Fatale as “a woman with both intelligence and sex appeal that uses these skills to manipulate poor helpless men into doing what she wants. May cause death.” Keeping in line with this concept, Caitlin Albritton's "Femme Visuale" series aims to highlight local women artists and show off some lesser-known talent that's been hiding in the shadows. Art as a grand spectacle leaves little room for modest, sincere, or quiet voices, especially women's voices. And I promise, we won’t bite.
This article appears in May 11-18, 2017.