Some artists begin with a prestigious art school, years of formal training, and a carefully mapped career plan. Lindsey Spears began with an ugly bedroom wall.
“I actually have no formal art training other than my high school art classes,” Spears said. “Initially in life, my plan was to pursue zoology, work with wildlife.”
She started following that plan, briefly working at the Jacksonville Zoo. But when she began having children, the realities of the schedule prompted her to reconsider what she wanted her working life to look like. Art had always been there, something Spears imagined she might pursue on the side as a hobby. So, she decided to give it a little more attention.
Then a little more. And eventually, a whole lot more.
“It started out as just a little side hobby, and then the rest is history,” she said. “I started booking more, and then it just became my full-blown career.”
Today, Spears’ canvases can be measured not just in inches, but in feet – and sometimes in entire walls, rooms, and buildings. Her colorful murals enliven public and private spaces, while her live paintings capture weddings and special events as they unfold. Along the way, the wildlife she once imagined making her career has found its way back into her life, too – only now, she’s painting it.
Spears didn’t initially set out to become a muralist. Like much of her artistic career, it happened because she was willing to try something she had never done before. Someone asked if she had ever painted murals, and she responded, “No, but it looks really cool.”
Her first experiment was close to home – inside it, in fact. While postpartum and spending a great deal of time in her bedroom, Spears decided the space needed some help.
“I was just hanging out in my room, and I thought, ‘It’s ugly in here,’” she said.
So, she painted a large mural on the wall and posted a photo on Facebook.
“More people were like, ‘Oh my gosh, do you do this?’” Spears recalled. “And I said, ‘I do now!’”
It might be the perfect summary of her career. One mural led to another. Then came a bigger wall. Then someone asked whether she could go bigger still.
“I would paint one, and someone would be like, ‘Could you do a bigger one?’” she said. “And I just tried it out. A lot of trial and error.”
Those walls continued growing, and Spears grew right along with them.
Artist Lindsey Spears is photographed next to one of her murals, featuring everyone’s favorite four-legged friends.
The Art of Going Big
Painting a mural isn’t simply painting a traditional canvas on a larger surface. Scale changes everything. A tiny mark in a sketch might become a brushstroke a foot wide on a wall. Details that look perfectly balanced on an iPad must retain their proportion when stretched across 20 feet. Spears also wants her murals to retain the qualities of a painting rather than becoming overly graphic as they grow.
“I really like my pieces to look painterly,” she said. “I don’t want them to look too blocky, too clip-art-like. I like you to see the brushstroke.”
Learning to preserve that character while increasing the scale has been part of her evolution as a muralist. Fortunately, she has also found creative ways to transfer her designs onto enormous spaces without relying on complicated mathematics.
“Thank God it’s not math for me, because I’m actually so bad at that,” she joked. “For all the art ability I have, I have zero math skills.”
One of her favorite techniques is called the “doodle method,” a variation on a traditional grid system. Spears covers a wall with random doodles, photographs it, then overlays a transparent version of her planned artwork onto the photograph on her iPad. The doodles become landmarks that help her translate the smaller design accurately onto the much larger surface.
When painting murals at schools, Spears will sometimes lets the students create those landmarks themselves.
“I’ll let the kids do the doodles,” she said. “This blows their mind. I say, ‘Just draw whatever you want.’”
Cats, suns, shapes, and other childhood creations temporarily cover the wall before becoming the hidden framework beneath Spears’ finished artwork. Technology is a tool rather than a crutch. When circumstances allow, she uses the doodle method or a projector to reduce sketching time. When they don’t, she simply draws the old-fashioned way.
Spears painted the mural of Old Town Bluffton at Eggs Up Grill in New Riverside.
Art With a Wild Side
Ask Spears to describe her work, and two characteristics immediately emerge: Color and nature.
“I would describe it as very colorful, with a lot of ties to nature,” she said. “Even though art is a passion, wildlife and nature are a huge passion of mine. So anytime I’m able to combine those things, it’s a dream.”
In some ways, Spears never truly abandoned that early plan to make wildlife part of her life. Instead, she found another way to honor it. She has worked with conservation organizations and participates in an artist-in-residence program with state parks, painting murals in those settings. She has also brought her art full circle to the Jacksonville Zoo, where she once worked, returning as an artist to create work supporting conservation.
Stylistically, Spears enjoys the tension between realism and imagination. Animals might be rendered with careful accuracy, while their surroundings explode with unexpected color, playful patterns, and fanciful details.
“I really like keeping the animals, if I have them in a piece, very realistic,” she said. “But I love doing pops of color. I’ll do colored polka dots or maybe a crazy, multicolored background with leaves.”
The result is unmistakably joyful: Recognizable subjects live within a world where nature gets permission to become just a little more exuberant.
A colorful mural at Wildflower Girls Boutique.
When the Canvas Has a Ceiling
The increasingly ambitious scale of Spears’ work has also introduced a decidedly physical element to her profession. She owns scaffolding. She climbs. She stretches. She paints overhead. And occasionally, she gets paint in her face.
Spears has completed several ceiling murals, including a large project in Harbour Town and a 20-foot ceiling for Clemson University off-campus student housing, as well as residential installations. Painting ceilings, she admits, comes with a price. “I just have to go get a deep tissue massage after,” she said. “There’s no way around it.”
Working from scaffolding while sometimes painting essentially upside down can be grueling. “I have had paint drip into my face regularly,” she said.
Still, challenging spaces are part of what keeps the work interesting. A muralist must be artist, problem solver, and sometimes something close to an acrobat, figuring out not only what should go onto a surface but how in the world to get it there.
Spears’ distinctive work is also artfullly displayed on the side of one of Bluffton Breeze’s buses.
Art on the Move
One of Spears’ most visible projects isn’t a wall at all. It moves. She designed the artwork for a Bluffton Breeze bus operating in Old Town Bluffton, transforming public transportation into what she affectionately describes as “a traveling billboard for art.”
“It’s just like a giant billboard that runs around with my art, which I think is so cool, because it’s just bringing public art everywhere,” Spears said. “When you paint on a wall, it’s stationary. People have to come to it. But when you paint on a bus, it travels around for everyone to see.”
The project also earned her a particularly coveted review.
“That was the first project I ever did that I think my kids thought I was cool,” she said.
Her current favorite, however, is a recently completed installation at Montage Palmetto Bluff. The immersive Lowcountry scene wraps around five interior walls. If placed end to end, Spears estimates the mural would stretch approximately 100 feet.
Rather than simply depicting the Lowcountry landscape, Spears created an environment meant to be explored. Local creatures are partially concealed throughout the scene for children to discover.
“It’s a full scenery, like Lowcountry scenery,” she said. “It’s got different wildlife for kids to find in it. Lots of scenery, with birds, crabs, and squirrels hidden in it.”
It is large, intricate, and detailed – the kind of project that shows just how far Spears has traveled from that first bedroom wall.
A perfect photo op at the Art Cafe near Coligny Plaza.
Painting the Moment
Not all of Spears’ work requires scaffolding. Her second artistic specialty unfolds on a much more intimate – and emotional – scale: live event painting.
“I love, love, love doing the live paintings,” she said.
At weddings, Spears might create a ceremony canvas, painting the scene while the couple exchanges vows and continuing throughout the celebration. Depending on the complexity, some couples can leave the wedding with the finished painting; others receive it after Spears completes final touch-ups.
She also creates quick guest portraits, producing small sketches in approximately five minutes and giving attendees a personalized piece of artwork to take home.
The event work provides a natural complement to murals. Weddings occupy weekends, while murals can fill weekdays. When the physical demands of mural work become exhausting, event painting offers a change of pace. When weekends become packed, she can return to walls during the week.
Galas, meanwhile, offer Spears an opportunity to combine art, wildlife, and philanthropy. For the Jacksonville Zoo’s conservation gala celebrating the opening of its manatee exhibit, Spears live-painted a large manatee piece that was auctioned during the event, with proceeds benefiting conservation.
The experience was especially memorable because wildlife conservationist Robert Irwin served as keynote speaker, and the finished painting was purchased by an NFL player.
“When I get to do galas for good causes, too, through my live events, it’s so fun,” Spears said.
The Harder You Work
Perhaps the most compelling part of Spears’ story is not the scale of her murals or even the unusual places her art has taken her. It is how she got there.
She is candid about being self-taught and considers that fact important – not because she dismisses formal education, but because she wants other creative people to understand there is more than one route to becoming an artist.
“I really love to stress to people that I did not go to art school, because some people think that you have to be trained to do something well,” she said.
Spears acknowledges that she has a natural artistic ability, but she is equally clear that talent alone did not create her career. “I have to be honest, I do not think my starting point was that impressive,” she said. “But I have painted every day for 10 years.”
That means thousands upon thousands of brushstrokes, on walls and canvases, with mistakes and corrections – some experiments that worked and others that became lessons. Each project prepared her for the next one, and every time someone asked, “Could you do something bigger?” Spears found out that she could.
People sometimes tell her she is lucky. Spears agrees that she is, but with a qualification. “I love the phrase ‘The harder you work, the luckier you are,’” she said. “If anyone puts in an amount of work and practices, they’ll be good at something.”
For someone who never planned to make art her career, it has become a remarkably fitting philosophy. Spears’ life still includes the wildlife she loved enough to study. It includes the family that prompted her to reconsider her original career path. It includes weddings, celebrations, conservation, community, and the landscapes of the Lowcountry.
And, increasingly, it includes very big walls waiting for Spears to make them a little less ordinary.
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