SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — You can see outdoor murals on many buildings around Sullivan County. They’re big and colorful, and several were designed and painted by Joshua Noah, founder and owner of Lowkey Creative Art. His path to success took many turns before he came to painting outdoor murals.

He remembered that he began drawing when he was in kindergarten or first grade.  But by the time he was in second grade, his interests turned to other activities.

He didn’t resume his artwork until he was a student at SUNY Sullivan, majoring in business. His friends there encouraged him and he turned to doing graffiti, which was how some artists expressed themselves at the time. “I was obsessed with graffiti,” Noah said. “Graffiti kind of opened my eyes and more doors as to what the possibilities were as far as art goes.”

He began drawing portraits, first of a rapper whose music he really liked, then of another musician. He said his friends were “blown away” by them. Noah continued drawing, moving on to different things that inspired him. When he began to show his work, people reacted with great enthusiasm. “That made me feel like I had a purpose and I really loved doing it,” Noah said.

He thinks that graffiti is what led him to painting outdoor murals, since graffiti artists, using spray paint, drew on the outer walls of buildings and other structures. “When I went on vacations or to visit my family in Florida,” he said, “I started to see a lot more large-scale public artwork. I started to see a lot of murals and a lot of public graffiti.” Because he loved using spray paint and was looking for a challenge, he decided that painting on a giant wall was what he wanted to do. 

Noah paints both outdoor murals using spray paint, and indoor murals using brush paints. “I prefer to spray paint,” he said.  “Once you learn spray painting, it becomes a really fast medium to work with. It cuts your time basically in half on projects.” For brush painting both indoors and outdoors, he uses exterior paint such as Benjamin Moore brand; for spray painting, he uses an artist-grade spray paint.

The first mural he painted was a hand holding a rabbit’s foot. He painted it on a wall of a dilapidated, fallen-apart summer camp that had lost its roof and already sported the work of graffiti artists.

His first paid mural was done for friends in Newburgh, who commissioned him to paint a wall-to-wall mural of a bird and the Newburgh Beacon Bridge in their office. 

Noah works with clients these days, talking with them to see what they envision and doing preliminary mockups on his iPad using a program called Procreate.  “Originally, I was drawing everything in my sketchbook, and clients looking at other pages would be like ‘I love the bird here, but I don’t like this,’ and I’d have to flip the page and redraw everything all over again.” The Procreate program allows him to quickly make any changes the client requests while they are together. He can also take a picture of the wall on which the painting will go and superimpose his design right onto the wall.

One of his recent clients owns Kevin’s Restaurant in Rock Hill. In initial discussions, Noah proposed painting a still life with a bowl of fruit or something else that would be seen in a kitchen, since it would go on the outside wall of a restaurant.   They also discussed showing a hand holding a knife and cutting vegetables. “I did two separate designs,” Noah said.  “Kevin liked the one I painted with vegetables and no hand.” Noah often inserts a small figure of himself into his paintings, as he did with the one that is on the wall of Kevin’s Restaurant.

He said that for the past year, he’s been focused on his personal growth. But making clients happy, continuing to grow as an artist, inspiring others and helping other artists figure out their own paths are still important to Noah and he intends to continue to do that.

Find Lowkey Creative Art on Instagram at www.instagram.com/lowkey_creative/?.