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Music to Michelangelo

Renowned North Carolina artists are back right where they came from, larger than life-size, in the inspiring murals of Scott Nurkin ’00.

by Eric Frederick ’81
photos by Grant Halverson ’93

“I couldn’t believe when I found out how many musicians — not just musicians, but trailblazers — happen to be from North Carolina.”

Scott Nurkin ’00 was looking at a grand list. Earl Scruggs, from outside Shelby, invented a banjo technique that bears his name. John Coltrane (born in Hamlet) and Thelonious Monk (Rocky Mount) transformed jazz. Roberta Flack (Black Mountain) is the only solo artist to win consecutive Record of the Year Grammy awards.

Betty Davis, Durham

Now Nurkin, a Chapel Hill muralist, is enshrining them, and many more, in their hometowns. In a big way.

Nurkin recalls that during his starving-artist period in the mid-2000s, he “kept gas in the tank” by painting lots of beer murals and signs. Many were on the walls at He’s Not Here downtown, where beer distributors would walk in, “they’d see a mural and they’d go, ‘Wow! We need one of these!’ ”

Since then, he has created hundreds of public works of art — including the Dean Smith mural at Smith Level Road and U.S. 15-501 and the giant “Greetings from Chapel Hill” postcard on the Rosemary Street side of He’s Not Here.

A turning point for him was a wall of portraits he painted of North Carolina musicians inside Pepper’s Pizza on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, for which his payment was beer and pizza for life. When Pepper’s closed in 2013, his pizza ticket was gone, and the collection went to Hill Hall.

But those portraits got him thinking about doing murals in the hometowns of those people. He’s a musician himself — a drummer since he was 13, growing up in Charlotte. Now 45, he still plays in two bands he helped found in his 20s — Dynamite Brothers and Birds of Avalon.

Coltrane went up first, on the old Hamlet Theatre.

“I sat on the idea for a very long time. And then about two years ago, it was sort of ‘now or never.’ ” He started cold-calling town managers “and anybody that would listen” or could find some funding.

The North Carolina Musician Murals project was born.

Coltrane went up first, on the old Hamlet Theatre. Nurkin now has honored Flack, Monk and Scruggs, plus Don Gibson in Shelby, Betty Davis in Durham, Randy Travis in Marshville, Nina Simone in Tryon, and Libba Cotten on Merritt Mill Road where Carrboro meets Chapel Hill.

He hopes the murals instill pride in townsfolk who may be unaware of their heritage.

Thelonius Monk, Rocky Mount.

“The whole goal is to let people know that not only do we have this wealth of musicians, we have the very best.”

The project has meant even more than he hoped.

“I’ve had people cry,” Nurkin said while spraying a few spots of Monk onto a building where the Masons meet in downtown Rocky Mount. “In Hamlet, a guy stopped me and asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s Coltrane, you know. He’s a giant.’ And when I explained it all, he broke down. He started crying. I started crying. I still get chills talking about it.

“You know, Black people weren’t allowed in that building a hundred years ago, and now there’s this 60-foot-tall portrait.”

Wait. Sixty feet? How can Nurkin so accurately render an image on that scale?

Pretty much the same way Michelangelo did.

Nina Simone, Tryon.

“So, I have an image on an 11-by-8 piece of paper,” he explained — sometimes a photo, sometimes his own design. “I put a grid down, and then I overlay the image onto the grid, and I can sort of work from there and line up things — like where eyeballs meet and where the face and the mouth are.”

Mentally transferring the grid to a huge wall, Nurkin goes to work — with some new techniques. “Up until about four years ago I was exclusively using ladders,” he said. “It just never occurred to me to try to get the client to pay for a lift.” Now it does.

Don Gibson, Shelby.

“I used to paint walls exclusively by brush and roller,” he added, “until about two years ago, when I began seeing muralists … creating hyper-realistic murals with spray cans. Nowadays I typically use an airless sprayer or roll the background color or primer, and then 90 to 95 percent of the mural is done with aerosol.

“I do not miss having to wash slop buckets full of brushes.”

Each mural takes about a week, and sometimes that means a hotel stay, away from his wife, Erin, and 9-year-old daughter, Finch. But some of his past works took much longer. “The Dean Smith mural — that was a labor of love,” done on his own time on a gas station wall near his shop, he said. It took eight weeks to finish, after Smith died in 2015.

Roberta Flack

When he proposes to immortalize a musician, Nurkin said, the town’s reaction is always: “Yeah, we want to do it; this sounds great.” But some don’t have the money, and Nurkin, like a creative musician, has to improvise — as he did in Flack’s hometown.

“We drove around Black Mountain and found Black Mountain Brewing. It has a perfect wall, right in the center of town.” He called the owner, John Richardson — who, it turns out, also happens to be a fundraiser. Richardson loved the idea and led a GoFundMe campaign, and now Flack silently entertains there daily.

“We have an issue with inclusivity and diversity in western North Carolina,” Richardson said, “and I have seen more Black people and more people of color, which is a beautiful thing, since the mural has gone up.

Earl Scruggs, Shelby.

“I just can’t sing Scott’s praises enough. I don’t know if he realizes what kind of an impact he is going to have for generations to come.”

Meanwhile, after years of hard work, Nurkin, now owner of The Mural Shop outside Chapel Hill, gets to indulge his passions: art, music and wildlife, which he studies when he can, in a large yard with Finch. In another life, he said, he might be “surveying snake populations in the Amazon River basin.”

“I’ve taken every odd job, from painting children’s nurseries to painting hoods of cars or whatever, so I can actually afford this. I feel very privileged.”

Eric Frederick ’81 is an editor at EducationNC, writer of the NC Local newsletter for the NC Local News Workshop and a freelance writer based in Raleigh.


 

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