Outdoor Street Art Gallery

The Blue Lot is an outdoor street art gallery at the corner of 1st and Bush in Downtown Santa Ana. The lot hosts work from local and international artists and serves as a community event space year round.

The mural I painted runs 42 feet wide and 12 feet tall across the exterior wall. It’s the only piece in the lot painted with brushes. Everything else is spray paint. That distinction is visible in the texture from the street.

The work is a calligraffiti mandala. From a distance it reads as abstract. Up close, the brushstrokes spell out the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13. That’s intentional. The message is there for anyone who looks long enough to find it.

Painting a 42-Foot Wall

At the time, this was the largest wall I had painted on my own. Before a single stroke of paint went down, I spent eight hours buffing and prepping the surface with one other person helping. The prep took longer than the planning.

The concept came from somewhere specific. I had been thinking about the Lord’s Prayer — “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” — and how that connects to Revelation 21:1-3, where God brings the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, down to a new earth. The idea of heaven meeting earth felt right for a wall that size in a public space. That’s what’s embedded in the piece.

How I Approached the Composition

Every mandala starts the same way: find the center. I measured horizontally across the wall, then vertically, marked the intersection, and anchored a long piece of string there with chalk on the opposite end. From that center point I drew the circular outlines working from the outside in, deciding the spacing of each concentric ring as I went.

I considered splitting the composition into two half mandalas — one starting at the top right, one at the bottom left, similar to how I approached the Venice Beach Art Walls piece. In the end I wanted something bolder. One large, centered 3D calligraffiti mandala. The full wall, one focal point.

It was the right call for the space.

Working with Public Venues

The Blue Lot is a public art context — the wall faces the street and the audience is anyone who walks or drives past. That’s a different kind of accountability than a private commercial interior. People watch you work. Strangers stop to ask questions. The piece gets photographed before it’s finished.

What doesn’t change is the process. Same prep, same centering approach, same commitment to the composition. The scale changes. The approach doesn’t.

My First Mural at The Blue Lot

This was a collaboration with Alepsis Hernandez, a Long Beach-based artist I met while working at the Art Supply Warehouse. We saw enough common ground in our styles to try something together.

I used a color scheme I hadn’t worked with before. Alepsis brought her spray paint work, a portrait of a young girl. Two different techniques, two different subjects, same space.

Start a Project

If you’re looking for a large-scale exterior or interior mural for a commercial property in Orange County or Los Angeles, get in touch. This is the kind of work I do.