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Sarah Sheppard, one of our favorite mural artists, creates works with an otherworldly beauty, incorporating elaborate narrative elements and rich color. CL caught up with the St. Pete-based artist to find out about her latest urban masterpiece on the Morean Arts Center's back wall (Central Avenue and Seventh Street, St. Petersburg).
The AARP and the Morean approached Sheppard to create a mural on the Morean's wall, she explained, and to consider the ideas of "Life Reimagined" and "Disrupt Aging."
"The story line," Sheppard explains, is that the gears represent what has been the grind of [the subject's] daily life, the lapse of time and the mechanics of the working world. She is a tree, a Banyan tree that sinks and spreads her roots into the community. and she is reaching out to the Phoenix , her rebirth, to this next stage of her life."
Why is the organization for aging Americans involved in murals? "AARP is working in Tampa bay to support the arts because a vibrant cultural life connects people to their community.'
