A Norfolk Western 1218 locomotive emerges from a hazy, sage-green landscape painted on a three-story brick building in downtown Roanoke. The mural, titled “Nature Train,” features two tall trees shedding leaves, along with a squirrel and vines clinging to what was the world’s most powerful historic steam locomotive built by the railroad, now the Norfolk Southern, based in this city of southwest Virginia. The privately commissioned artwork is one of two consecutive pieces former educator Jon Murrill painted last summer that capture his purpose and evolution as a muralist since embarking on this new career two years ago.
Murrill’s “Nature Train” mural highlights Roanoke’s history as a city built by the railroads.
The other mural was a publicly bid project with volunteers who helped adorn a bridge underpass along the Roanoke River Greenway, a 14-mile trail winding through wooded areas of the city and surrounding towns. This larger-scale composition also incorporates local nature, featuring a Virginia box turtle and multicolored river rocks alongside an oversized portrait of a purple-eyed local woman. Her lids and lower lip are shaded moss-green and a royal blue dragonfly perches on her finger resting contemplatively on her chin. Titled "Lady of the River," the mural is the third in Murrill’s Lady Appalachia series. These murals showcase individual women with diverse features, colors, and textures who share details reflective of the Roanoke Valley and wider Appalachian region.
“I feel that the idea of representing the more natural elements of our area and landscape seems a bit more feminine to me,” Murrill says when explaining the concept of his series.
“Lady of the River” is the latest portrait in Murrill’s Lady Appalachia mural series that allows him to inject more of his own creative vision into his commissions.
These particular murals are his main conduit to incorporate more of his creative vision into client commissions and advance his broader goal of elevating public art appreciation in Roanoke to levels seen in other mural-friendly cities across Virginia, North Carolina, and beyond.
“I think in the heart of southwest Virginia, public art is not necessarily at a place where it is in other areas of the country,” Murrill opines. “You look at Philadelphia or Wynwood in Miami, but even places like Richmond or Charlotte, these bigger Southern cities that are not known specifically for public art, but there’s still a lot more general interest in it.”
Art Grows in Roanoke
“I feel that the idea of representing the more natural elements of our area and landscape seems a bit more feminine to me. ”
A city shaped by 19th-century railroads, Roanoke now boasts a healthcare-driven economy, a population of 100,000, and a growing arts scene, with Murrill emerging as a prominent figure. Notable developments include the Randall Stout-designed Taubman Museum of Art that opened in 2008, and an uptick in art galleries in and around the city.
“There were only a handful of art galleries when I came here from upstate New York about 10 years ago, and now we have quite a few and quite an active art scene, both the visual and performing arts and other forms of art,” said Ed Hettig, curator of Alexander / Heath Contemporary, a downtown gallery showcasing local artists, including Murrill.
In 2023, international artists James Bullough, Onur Dinc and Thiago Valdí were invited to Roanoke to paint outdoor murals. Murrill assisted Bullough and collaborated with Valdí. That year, the City of Roanoke also accepted Murrill’s bids to lead its mural projects with local and statewide volunteers, citing his concept of “community painting sessions” as a key component.
Thiago Valdí of Brazil, right, was one of three international artists who painted murals in Roanoke with Murrill’s assistance in 2023.
Talia Logan, director of the Olin Hall Galleries at Roanoke College, observes that the city's art scene has grown organically, driven largely by a cadre of unsung underground artists. A college trustee who serves on the Whitney Museum of American Art's board has drawn New York artists to the area who have encouraged locals to explore more experimental forms of public art than Roankers typically endorse.
“Roanoke is pretty traditional,” Logan says, echoing a sentiment Murrill shares. “The people who support the arts, meaning the people who have the money to purchase and buy art, like more of the traditional themes. What’s great is that over time we’ve had a lot of younger people move to Roanoke and stay and have a broader idea of what art can be.”
Although farm animals, rural landscapes and like subjects have typically characterized public art in the city, Murrill believes more Roanokers are warming to his brand of art emphasizing the region’s distinct natural attributes, history and landmarks.
“In our area, change comes a bit slower,” he says. “People can be very guarded in terms of what is accepted or celebrated or what they really want to put their stamp of approval on. And so by generating these images and designs around wildlife and our mountain vistas and landmarks, it started to gain momentum.”
From the Beginning
Murrill was a fulltime art teacher and regularly entered his hyper realistic charcoal portrait drawings in national juried contests before venturing into mural work in early 2022. His initial commissions were mainly small, indoor projects for restaurants, breweries and a local credit union, showcasing subjects from vintage motorcycles to an intricate tree root design that were centered around more commercial aesthetics.
“Over time we’ve had a lot of younger people move to Roanoke and stay and have a broader idea of what art can be.”
The next year, Murrill started creating larger outdoor murals for private and public clients, mainly using rollers and brushes for their foundations and spray paint cans for details. Among these were two collaborative community projects with local government and organizations and volunteers. The first was the original Southeast Greenways Project, where Murrill led dozens of volunteers to learn from him and assist in painting two walls on bridge underpasses. Each wall featured reed-lined lakes and oversized indigenous birds, cedar waxwings and a green heron, and the iconic five-point Roanoke Star, the 88-foot illuminated landmark that stands atop a mountain overlooking the city.
The city also selected Murrill to spearhead a second community project, a 380-foot-long mural on an elevated roadway at a sports complex, his largest project to date, which involved nearly 100 statewide volunteers. Murrill’s design, composed of pale yellow and purple tones, features silhouettes of a kayaker, mountain biker, and kite flyers set against the Blue Ridge Mountains, a recurring backdrop. These larger projects provided him with greater visibility, more commissions, and the ability to leave his teaching career to paint murals fulltime in 2023.
Murrill and the volunteers who assisted him in painting a 380-foot wall in Roanoke celebrated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“That’s when I started to change my mindset to: ‘Okay, if I want to build a business around this, I need to look beyond the smaller indoor pieces,’” he recalled. “Once you paint these larger walls of prominence, people see that and the word spreads.”
Another transitional mural for Murrill that year was a panoramic of Roanoke’s skyline silhouetted against the Blue Ridge Mountains on the brick exterior of a sports cafe in neighboring Salem. At one end, hikers stand on McAfee’s Knob, an iconic rock outcrop of the Appalachian Trail overlooking Roanoke Valley; to the far left is an image of a telescope-wielding Andrew Lewis, a Revolutionary soldier and surveyor of southwest Virginia. The mural was experimental in stylization and saturated colors, especially its fiery red-orange sky.
“That project aligned itself with my new idea of focusing on natural imagery and our surroundings,” Murrill says. “I was thinking: ‘As I progress, do I really want to continue painting murals that are primarily business-oriented?’ So, I began to gear my designs more towards the outdoors in Roanoke, which is now branding itself as this hub for outdoor sports, hiking, mountain biking, and those kinds of activities. That’s the beginning of where my designs transitioned.”
This work on a building in Salem played a key role in Murrill’s growth as a muralist who focuses on representing the history, landmarks and natural environment in southwest Virginia.
That year, he also painted a more metaphorical piece for a company that installs fireplaces. One section features boys seated around a campfire with shooting sparks representing the ideas people often share in such settings.
In an Instagram update about this mural, Murrill wrote about the difficulty of painting with spray cans, and added: “... I’m finding the ‘risk’ of challenging myself in new ways like this is the most satisfying part of the experience. The learning never stops!”
A longtime charcoal portraitist, Murrill never imagined he one day would use spray paint and walls to create his art.
A 2023 highlight for Murrill was learning from a variety of international artists that he assisted with their mural projects in Roanoke. While painting a rock climber on a credit union’s building, the Berlin-based American Bullough showed Murrill how to effectively use spray cans with various caps, especially to produce more convincing flesh tones. Brazil’s Valdí helped him develop a more fluid approach with larger caps and more expressive linework. The Swiss-German Dinc taught him more efficient roller techniques and blending with brushes.
These artists also encouraged Murrill to paint oversized subjects, sometimes dozens of feet tall, with greater control over small details using cans.
“I’m quite amazed at how fast Jon works,” said Hettig, whose gallery held an exhibit featuring Murrill’s charcoal drawings in 2023. “I’m always in awe of muralists because I'm an artist myself and I can’t picture myself doing work so large and so well. It really is quite a feat and quite awesome.”
Origins of a Portraitist
Growing up in Roanoke, Murrill was inspired by his family of educators and artists. As a youth, he favored drawing over painting, and in high school he was keen on a career drafting architectural blueprints. Ultimately, though, he decided he wanted to work in the artworld in some capacity, not necessarily as a fulltime artist.
To help finance his Master of Fine Arts at Radford University from 2011-12, he took a construction job. This experience sparked his series “Working Class Portraits," featuring gritty paintings of his peers created solely with palette knives instead of brushes. This eventually became his thesis coinciding with an educational degree. At Radford, Professor Z. L. Feng, a Chinese international watercolorist and charcoal artist, profoundly influenced him.
“I’m always in awe of muralists because I’m an artist myself and I can’t picture myself doing work so large and so well. ”
By 2019, already well into what became a decade-long career teaching everything from drawing to watercoloring to art history and appreciation at the high school and collegiate levels, Murrill launched “Inspiring Icons.” This collection of charcoal portraits features such notable figures as Martin Luther King Jr., author James Baldwin, and basketball legend Kobe Bryant. This experimental subseries was distinct from his more labor-intensive charcoal portraits, which he had been drafting for years and entering into national juried contests, often earning top or secondary prizes and extra income. One standout is a stunning lifelike portrait of the late celebrity chef and documentarian Anthony Bourdain that demanded more than one hundred hours of work.
“This piece was over 100 hours of pure technical detail” Murrill wrote in an Instagram post about drawing the late Anthony Bourdain.
Eventually, Murrill felt the need to explore new avenues artistically, a decision that was soon satisfied when he was asked to paint a mural in a restaurant. At the time, he never imagined that spray paint would become his medium and walls his canvas. Today, his prior portraiture work finds new expression in his latest series, Lady Appalachia, bridging his artistic past and present.
“I did portraits for a long time and I have a great passion for representing human expression,” Murrill says. “And so as I transitioned into public art, I thought ‘how can I do this in a way that’s interesting and unique but also ties into our area?’ I can paint a picture of anybody on a wall, really, but I want to do something that captures the spirit of our area.”
Creating Ladies
During winter 2023, as Murrill assessed his growth as a public artist, he explored various design concepts. This led to his vision for Lady Appalachia, a planned series of more than a dozen murals combining his beloved portraiture with celebrations of the region's natural beauty. The project promises to push him toward more thought-provoking, theme-driven work.
“During that thought process, I always came back to the thought that if I wasn’t incorporating portraiture, I wasn’t being true to myself as an artist,” he says. “I wasn’t going to be stretching myself. So that was a very important decision.”
Murrill completed his first Lady Appalachia mural on a Vinton municipal building’s facade in April 2024. The 22-foot-tall portrait depicts a young woman with moss-colored eyeshadow and her fingers pressing deeply into her cheek with deerspot freckles. Some passers-by may interpret this as a tensely quizzical expression; others may recognize that the portrait was inspired by the Statue of Liberty. She sports a bird’s nest crown and grasps a tree branch the way Lady Liberty holds her torch. The mural is otherwise monopolized by rolling green hills and mountains that wrap around one side of the building.
People took notice. Among them was Genya Kalinina, who on her @hello.roanoke Instagram account that reports goings-on in and around the city, posted an image of the mural and wrote: “[T]his masterpiece by @jonmdraws brings a whole new level of energy to Downtown Vinton.”
Murrill received many questions from people about the nature of his first first Lady Appalachia portrait on a building in Vinton.
Murrill also received many questions about the portrait’s enigmatic air: What is she thinking? What does her expression represent? Through his series, he aims to spark viewers’ curiosity and imagination, enticing them to engage more deeply with each work.
“In any sort of portrait, you’re thinking ‘What is this person’s story?’,” Murrill explains. “I want people to be able to see a picture—an image, a mural—and to formulate their own idea of what that person’s story is, or what is the narrative being told. I think that over the past 10 to 15 years of diving into different forms of portraiture, I’ve always felt that expression, pose and gaze can really lead people into forming their own narrative of a portrait.”
Next came “Lady Appalachia of the Pines,” painted on a triangular wall of a restaurant in Stuart. Only the upper half of the woman’s face is visible as she seems to peek over a tree with moss patches lying across the foreground, both evoking an air of mystery. Her green eyes resonate with leaves sprouting above one ear, while a pine cone appears over the other, and her brunette hair mirrors the color of the fallen tree. She is backed by misty purple mountains and a pale yellow sky.
“The Lady of the Pines” is the second portrait in the Lady Apalachia series that allows Murrill to inject more of his own creative vision into his commissions.
On completing this mural, Murrill posted pictures of it on Instagram and wrote: “This piece means so much to me as an artist[,] to see locals embrace new artwork celebrating our close relationship to the land, forests, and[,] in this case[,] the pines at twilight.”
About his third portrait in the series, “Lady of the River” at the Greenway bridge underpass, Murrill says he included water reflections in the mural to again ignite inquiries like: Is she underwater or not? Is she a more mythical representation, or is this just a basic portrait?
The American artist is pictured in the process of painting his first international mural in Florianopolis, Brazil.
Another highlight for Murill in 2024 was his invitation to paint in December a Lady Appalachia-like portrait (unrelated to his series) in Brazil, his first international project, thanks to his work with Valdí. He portrayed a woman engulfed by diverse plant life on a wall at an arts conference in Florianopolis.
As a Portraitist Grows
Amid his Lady Appalachia portraits, Murrill continued producing murals focused on aesthetic and visual appeal rather than themes in 2024. One notable piece, completed in New Castle that June, features an oversized black bear's head alongside smaller-scale deer and birds. The backdrop is a pasture with a red barn and an arched branch that divides the composition between a sky and mountains painted in blue and in purple-pink hues.
This was another community initiative involving volunteers, including students Murrill taught at the high school in Craig County, whose municipality received a tourism grant for the mural and a new farmer’s market. In November, he painted a sweeping landscape of green mountains and purple-tinted clouds with two large colorful cardinals on a law firm’s building in Clifton Forge.
This mural in Craig County was another community-oriented project with volunteers that included some of the former teacher’s high school students.
“Some of the murals that I’m asked to do are a bit more tourism-related that serve as visual landmarks for the towns,” Murrill says. “So pieces like that are very safe and beautiful as everybody enjoys mountain vistas.”
“I did portraits for a long time and I have a great passion for representing human expression. And so as I transitioned into public art, I thought ‘how can I do this in a way that’s interesting and unique but also ties into our area?’”
Among the more challenging works of this kind was a 30-foot-tall "Neon Owl" painted at a coffee shop near Virginia Tech in Blacksburg last May. The mural, featuring deep purples, pinks and greens with a fluorescent glow, was inspired by his vision to represent the idea that caffeine keeps people awake at night. He also created a more illustrative sports-clad rabbit for a running apparel store in Roanoke in October.
These more straightforward projects nevertheless test his technical skills, demonstrate his range and provide valuable lessons as he works to develop a more signature style.
“I think at this stage of my career, I’m trying to explore a variety of styles and ideas, so that I can grow and learn from each challenge,” he says. “So, these ideas are great for me because they stretch me in different ways.”
As Murrill’s style evolves, much of his work for the coming year will continue to revolve around developing the Lady Appalachia series. As it progresses, his designs will incorporate Appalachian folklore and myths, among other concepts. In particular, the women’s natural features will grow more pronounced to invoke increasingly ambiguous compositions. These features align with his vision to encourage more personal interpretations and, ultimately, a passion for public art.
“I want to see how a slightly more surrealist approach to representing these women is perceived and what I learn from that,” he says. “These stories will be interpreted in many different ways, which is very exciting, and I think that is more powerful than my murals giving away all the information. The mural is a shared experience.”
Photos Courtesty of Jon Murrill.
This feature story is dedicated to my nephew Brian Jones, who took me on my first bicycle ride through Roanoke, where we encountered Jon Murrill painting a mural on a building. - JK