The pungent odor from the paint can be smelled all the way down Beaumont’s Laurel Avenue as artists painted walls during the annual Mural Festival, March 2-3. From Australia down under to all across the United States, muralists from around the world decorated the walls of Beaumont.
Two artists from Spain caught the eyes of visitors with their realistic, photography-based murals. Slim Sa- font and Sebas Velasco have painted all across the world, from Switzerland to Serbia, and now to Southeast Texas.
Hailing from Barcelona, Slim has been painting since he was 13. He usually takes his own photograph and then paints it, but for Mural Fest, he decided to use artificial intelligence to create his image of Southeast Texas.
“This photo first comes from some references that I found online of photographs that people take when they go to the parks to take an alligator in their hands,” Slim says. “I liked this idea and this type of image. I tried to get it, but with lights and a composition that was more interesting. Through artificial intelligence, using various pa- rameters, I got more or less what I wanted, and this photograph came out.”
Safont’s mural features three young men holding an alligator in a suburban neighborhood. He says he based the idea on news stories he read of people domesticating wild animals.
“Reading a little before coming, I found the relationship people have here with wild animals very curious,” he said. “(There’s) nothing like the idea of trying to domesticate the wild, which is a very characteristic behavior of human beings who think they can control everything.
“I was watching some news about people who had giant crocodiles in their home. Or people who have snakes or people who have things that in Europe are not common. And here they do. This seemed curious to me.”
Unlike Safont, Velasco used a real photo taken by his friend Jose Delou. The pair tried to portray Beaumont as accurately as possible, they said.
“We were looking for the aesthetic elements that we like,” Velasco said. “They often have to do with night scenes in which there is silence, but at the same time you can perceive a little bit of the noise of life or the city.”
Velasco’s mural depicts a young Black man superimposed over a night city scene with blurred lights.
“Once we had thought about the composition and the background, a little bit about the image, we needed a person to complete the image and then we looked around at night. We looked for a guy who would work with the composition.
“A local artist named Inés Alvidres helped us, and we found a guy who was working in a food establishment. The next day, we returned to the place. We took those photos with the subject with the background we wanted and then we used that as in- spiration for a sketch.”
Velasco hails from Burgos, but now resides in San Sebastian, in Spain’s Basque country.
Thanks to artists like Slim and Ve- lasco, Beaumont has gained inter- national recognition as a mural art hotspot and has developed into a canvas for worldwide artists.