Artist Eric Vozzola’s Mural Opens Portals to New Worlds At Meow Wolf: Las Vegas

The last time we caught up with muralist and graphic designer Eric Vozzola was in 2018 when he used Dunn-Edwards VERSAFLAT® and SPARTASHIELD® paints to craft his interpretation of the Perseid Meteor Shower among the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. In that painting, he used hues from the 2018 color and design trends report and used Dunn-Edwards products to create joyful artwork combining his take on the West’s mountain and desert landscapes with psychedelic explorations of geometry and contrasting color palettes.

Photo Credit: Eric Vozzola

The world is in a very different place since the last time we spoke with Vozzola, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the artist’s fervor in creating work with vibrant colors like his new project for immersive and interactive art collective Meow Wolf, this time using Dunn-Edwards ACRI-HUES®, our ultra-low VOC, durable exterior paints, for a massive-scale mural on the side of Meow Wolf’s immersive Las Vegas experience, creatively named Area 15.

Photo Credit: Eric Vozzola

Vozzola is a Las Vegas native son and has consistently worked in the city, bedecking buildings with murals and exhibiting paintings at the Winchester Cultural Center and Whitney Library Gallery, honing his aesthetic, a mix of the natural environs around Las Vegas with graphic patterns, design and explosive color. “ I love the rich subtleties in color and form within the desert landscape, and some of the most colorful and beautiful skies I've ever seen in my life have been right above my hometown,” the artist stated.

Photo Credit: Michael deCesare

Meow Wolf’s fantastical worlds steered Vozzola’s design for the Area 15 mural, which centers on the merging of universes, a portal opening up from one world into another. “I incorporated different scenes blending and interacting with each other, large geometry and patterns acting as portals and small worlds colliding, and the overall composition itself looks as if it is ‘tearing away’ at the wall and one is viewing the piece through a window or a universal opening,” Vozzola stated.

Photo Credit: Eric Vozzola

Before getting started, Vozzola had some concerns about the paints’ ability to cover over the original dark gray wall, but was impressed at ACRI-HUES® consistency and color vibrancy. “These paints went on the wall so smoothly and evenly, and the colors remained rich as ever,” the artist stated, adding that they held up exceedingly well in the harsh conditions of desert sun, dust, wind and rain. “The areas of the wall that remained gray, you could totally see how the weather affected that, but the areas that were painted with the ACRI-HUES® saw no fluctuation. I'd say the quality across all of the Dunn Edwards products has always been
consistently the best.”

Photo Credit: Eric Vozzola

The sheer scale of the project was a new challenge for Vozzola. Once he created his concept, Vozzola had to use math and creativity to scale his sketch onto his 40-feet-tall-by-400-feet-wide canvas – Area 15’s dark gray wall. He used the building’s grid lines which separate parts of the wall and created quadrants that corresponded to sections of his original sketch. From there, he used math, his artistic eye and intuition to translate his drawing to the full size mural.

Photo Credit: Eric Vozzola

Eric Vozzola’s mural is the latest in public artwork cropping up all over the Las Vegas desert. Read about how muralist James Stanford brought a 19 foot sultan from Vegas’ heyday to life for the Neon Museum’s Whipple Building annex. And not far from Las Vegas, in the desert landscape of Palm Springs, see how painter Tysen Knight recently transformed Palm Springs’ city benches into bold works of pop art.