Amid the din of traffic along East Rosemary Street, Loren Pease paints a nature-inspired scene that stops some adults for a moment of wonder where a honeybee takes flight and a monarch butterfly discovers its blossom on a concrete pillar.
“It’s really a neat psychological experiment where families will walk by, and the kids pull the parents toward where I’m painting and moms say, ‘Oh no, we gotta go,” Loren, a muralist and owner of Sweet Pease Art, says. “The adults are on a mission, and the kids are so mindful of, ‘Oh, there’s something neat happening. There’s color.’ They’re drawn to it.”
More than 20 years ago, Loren stumbled into her profession as a large-scale public artist. The Connecticut native went to school in New York before moving to Greensboro, where she worked in advertising. She realized she needed more creativity, so she became an art teacher in Durham at Northern High School and Jordan High School.
“I taught everything – pottery, jewelry-making, portfolio art, AP art, drawing and painting,” Loren says. “I loved being around [art] all day. I loved the kids. It was just an energetic environment, and I felt like I was impacting them. I’ve had some students stay in touch, and it’s fun to keep those connections.”
In the early 2000s, a friend asked Loren to paint a baby nursery for her. Then another friend asked, and another. Loren stopped teaching in 2005 when she had the first of three sons with her husband, Ted Pease. Their kids are Andrew “A.J.” Pease, 19, Tyler Pease, 17, and Brady Pease, 13.
Meanwhile, Loren continued her weekend painting projects. By 2007, she had painted hundreds of baby nurseries and began covering the walls of pediatric clinics and the waiting rooms of dental offices.
Over time, Loren’s art grew in scale. “The bigger the jobs have gotten, the more complicated they’ve become,” she says. “We’re talking going from step stools to ladders to scaffolding to lifts to really big machinery that I never imagined I’d be driving. There’s something pretty cool about seeing a little, middle-aged woman up in this bucket way up in the sky. I can do it.”
Loren, who stands 5 feet, 3 inches tall, regularly climbs up and down ladders while balancing paint supplies. Just loading her truck can take an hour before she drives to a job site and another hour to unload at the end of the day.
“And that’s really hard on my body; it’s a super physical job,” she says. Loren recalls one job of painting a silo at Union Grove Farm with fellow artist Michael Brown.
“I don’t think I would have done it without him, because he has 30-plus years on lifts, ” Loren says. “We went up all the way to the top of the silo, and the wind is blowing and the lift is swaying. I mean, you’re painting with the wind. And those were definitely a couple of days that I’m thinking, ‘I have kids! What am I doing?’ But it was fun, and I definitely don’t have any fear of heights anymore.”
Public art has become increasingly popular as communities realize it’s a way to instill a sense of place and value. “Using the side of the building to create a feeling is like creating a billboard for your community; depending on emotion, you’re advertising a vibe for your community,” she says. “It can be a pretty powerful thing.”
Loren’s mark is felt all over the county: Her series of seven frog vignettes painted on the brick walls of various shops and businesses throughout Southern Village capture the attention of young children. In Carrboro, a gigantic food rainbow sweeps across a wall outside of Table on East Main Street. Across the road on a wall outside of WomanCraft Gifts at East Main Square, three panels of butterflies representing transformation take flight across three framed mirrors. A bit of whimsy greets the patrons of Steel String Brewery‘s Pluck Farm a few miles away. Loren’s uplifting paintings can be seen at three local elementary schools, a middle and two high schools.
Since 2020-ish, many people have been desperately hungry for unity and joy, and now politically, people are feeling the same. Murals create character. Some areas are so architecturally charming they don’t need murals. But other towns and buildings and walls scream for some colorful attention; we always need murals.
Overall, Loren doesn’t think of herself as an influencer, but it is tough to deny the impact her vibrant work has made on the people who see it. “This is so worth it because there are tons of people walking by who constantly look on and smile,” she says. “So I figure if I’m making someone smile in their day just by looking at a butterfly, I’m gonna keep painting butterflies. … And when these little kids, especially girls, see a woman up on a power lift, there’s something in them that clicks and says, ‘Oh, maybe I could do that.’ I like feeling like I’m influencing that little kiddo.”