Miracle Murals

Artist's New Job A Stroke Of Luck
By ELIZABETH LEE BROWN, The Tampa Tribune
Published: October 17, 2007

LUTZ - For two decades Don Smith has spent his days making molds and fitting amputees with his prosthetic creations.

He has labored in a laboratory plying with plaster, polymers and foam to cast and shape the artificial limbs.

At night, he would paint murals and help create elaborate stage designs for church performances.

The two seemingly incongruent careers have recently flip-flopped.
About 18 months ago, Smith launched Miracle Murals, a painting business where artists offer God-honoring artwork to local churches, schools, homes and businesses.
Creating murals has moved to the forefront, while prosthetics has been pushed to the backburner. Smith still spends two days a week as a certified prosthetist at Hanger Prosthetics & Orthotics in South Tampa.

But how did these two worlds collide and then swap?

The 47-year-old father of three believes it was divine intervention.
Art and drawing were early passions. He holds an arts degree from the University of Louisville. His focus was in drawing and printmaking.
But after graduation he struggled to sell any of his pieces. That's when a newspaper ad caught his eye. The classified ad called out, 'Work with foam and plastic - start the New Year right,' Smith said.That propelled him into a prosthetics career that wasn't too far from working in an art studio. In the lab, he used band saws, mixed plaster and made polymer forms in large ovens. He used sculpting tools to create one-of-a-kind pieces.
'It was a neat way to use my hand and eye coordination and to help people,' he said.

Smith said his life took a turn after a heavenly sign.
In 2005, he awoke at 3 a.m. drenched in a cold sweat. In a dream, he lost his prosthetics job. Then God came to him and told him not to worry, that he would start Miracle Murals. Smith said he wrote it all down. 'The business plan was laid out - that you're going to glorify my name painting murals,' he said. 'I wasn't sure what that meant. Am I just going to paint for churches and paint pictures of Jesus on the wall, and how is that going to happen? Not everyone wants a picture of Jesus on their church,' Smith said.

At the time his prosthetics career was blossoming. He was a manager at Hanger, where he has been working for 11 years. 'I had no intentions of doing this business at this stage of my life. I always thought my purpose was to do prosthetics and then paint,' Smith said. One night, while painting set props for a church cantata show, Smith told a colleague about his dream. The friend, Angel Schmidt, said she wanted to be his first employee when he launched the mural painting company. She now works for him as an artist. About the same time, his home church, Van Dyke United Methodist, accepted his proposal to paint a 4,000-square-foot mural in the children's classroom wing, one of his first commissioned works.

Several of Smith's murals can be seen across Lutz: in a teahouse, a new meat market and wine store, and in the children's Sunday school wing at Van Dyke Methodist.
One of Smith's recent works gives the illusion of a mountainside growing out of a wall.
The Butcher Block, a gourmet food store at 16319 N. Florida Ave. near Chapman Road, features the wine cave where Smith carved and painted Styrofoam to create large boulders around the doorway.The three-dimensional mural juts out 2 1/2 feet from the wall and was sealed with a flame-retardant coating to meet county fire codes.
The sculpture was inspired by a Napa Valley winery where a mason built a stone wall on the side of a hill. One of Smith's earlier works is an English countryside village mural at Mrs. Tea's Garden at 124 Flagship Drive off U.S. 41.
The hillside scene shows one of the oldest Anglo-Saxon churches in England, a cemetery, a row house, a windmill and a whimsical teapot-shaped hot-air balloon, all framed by a white baluster.

When Smith starts a mural, he usually sketches it on paper and then on the wall. He uses photos and other pictures as a reference. On larger, more complicated works, he lays out a storyboard. Smith's current mural project is transforming his two boys' bedroom into a soccer stadium. The mural will show his two children flanked by professional soccer players in a soccer arena during an afternoon game. Smith also plans to paint a cloudless sky, stadium seating and grass on the concrete floor.
'When you'll be sitting around the bed, I want it to look like you're in the soccer stadium. You'll basically be in the center of the field,' he said. His two sons, Elliott, 12, and Marcus, 8, play for the Hillsborough United soccer league.To make the work realistic, Smith photographed his sons standing against the bedroom wall in the same afternoon sun. He also snapped pictures of the afternoon sky outside his Heritage Harbor home, where he lives with his wife, Cheryl, his sons and his 17-year-old daughter, Hallie.
Smith said he is inspired by Julian Beever, a chalk artist whose pavement drawings have a three-dimension illusion when viewed from a specific angle.
Smith said he is going for the same effect for the soccer stadium but knows it will be a challenge with two walls.

The switch to Miracle Murals has been challenging but satisfying.
'It's been a good transition, and so far it's been working,' he said.
Smith spends three to four days of the week painting and two days in the prosthetics lab.
In times of doubt, he recalls what he said when his boss asked him about his dream job.
'I said, 'I know this is going to sound corny, but I just want to paint for Jesus,'' he said.

AT A GLANCE
WHAT: Miracle Murals
WEB SITE: www.miraclemurals .com
CALL: (813) 765-6043
Reporter Elizabeth Lee Brown can be reached at (813) 865-1502 or ebrown@tampatrib.com.

 Ending On A Good Note
By Courtney Cairns Pastor, Tampa Tribune, Fla.
Feb. 6--NORTHDALE -- Some people want to go out with a bang. Lynda Goetz's departure involved xylophones, choreography and three little pigs.
Goetz, Claywell Elementary School's music teacher, retired last week after 41 years of teaching, 19 of them at Claywell. She left with a production unlike anything else her students had seen.
More than 90 children and parents pitched in this week and last to perform a three-day run of a musical Goetz wrote for the school. "You've Got to Have Three" introduced cheeky versions of the "Three Billy Goats Gruff" in Act One and the "Three Little Pigs" in Act Two. A chorus and band of xylophones and triangles from children in kindergarten through fifth grade provided accompaniment.
"She's a giver all the way to the end," Principal Glenda Midili said .
The schoolwide play grew out of a Parent-Teacher Association idea. PTA members wanted to fund a project that would get more children involved in the school. Goetz suggested she write a musical.
It wasn't as far out as it sounded. Goetz, 62, used to direct Claywell fourth- and fifth-graders in the 1990s in productions of "The Pirates of Penzance" and "H.M.S. Pinafore." It got too hard to keep it up, she said, as the school dealt with crowding and pressures to succeed on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
Goetz also had experience writing music for locally produced shows. She loves composers Gilbert and Sullivan and said the music she writes reflects that influence.
"You've Got to Have Three" was the first time she combined songwriting, scriptwriting and directing. She came up with the music first and began rehearsing with the children in October as she finished the script. The plot and dialogue started flowing, she said.
"It was like a movie," Goetz said. "I saw it all in my head."
She made the costumes for the main characters and held rehearsals in the mornings before classes started and at her house during winter vacation. She has loved seeing the pieces come together.
"Kids are amazing," she said. "You never know; if you push them, they'll do it."
Parents and other teachers helped. Muralist Don Smith, who is married to a Claywell teacher and has a child in the play, painted sweeping farms and valleys for the set. Moms backstage pinned costumes and fixed pig snouts and goat horns on students' heads. They marveled at Goetz's talent and commitment.
"It is incredible what she can pull together in such a short amount of time," said Sharon Smith, a first-grade teacher whose son, Tyler, played "biggest billy goat."
Midili said Goetz knows how to extract the best from students as well.
"She taught us how to project our voices," said 9-year-old Molly O'Laughlin, one of the billy goats. "She taught us how to take breaths while we sing."
She and billy goat Payton Hiday, 9, also were impressed with Goetz's background. She had directed Brittany Snow in a play when she was at Claywell. The girls had seen Snow, who attended Gaither High School before moving to Hollywood, in the movie "Hairspray" last year.
Brooke Dupre, 10, commanded the stage as the "mean, ugly troll," a creature in Grinch-green that threatens to eat the Billy Goats Gruff. Goetz taught her to do a troll walk, and the fourth-grader skulked out from the bridge to deliver her lines. "It isn't easy to be mean, but I have a reputation to uphold," Brooke said, in character, during the play.
The play debuted Jan. 28 before Claywell students in the school cafeteria. Students also put on a show for family and friends on Thursday and more students on Monday.
Before the premiere, Goetz adjusted costumes and led the group in breathing exercises to relax them and to prepare them to sing. She introduced the musical to the student audience with a primer on theater behavior. "When the curtain closes, you are supposed to clap," she said. "Do not clap in the middle of songs. Wait until the end of the song."
She taught her cast about timing as well. If the audience laughed during a line, she said, they should stop talking and repeat what they said. Pausing for audience reaction comes with experience.
Between acts, she returned backstage for costume changes and last-minute reassurances before rushing to the front to take her place at the keyboard. Goetz followed along with the script during the dialogue, her lips moving to the lines, and occasionally she mouthed "louder" when voices fell.
Offstage, children peered between curtains to watch the action and mimed the motions during songs. At the end, the curtain closed, and the cast erupted in cheers.
They would do two more shows, and then Goetz would be retired. She loves to write, especially children's music, and was surprised at how much fun she had creating a script. She is thinking of doing more fairytale adaptations.
Reporter Courtney Cairns Pastor can be reached at (813) 865-1503 or cpastor@tampatrib.com.
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