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Featured Muralist: Emily Eldridge – Criss Construction building
The following is the third of an eight-part series on the artists who will be painting the seven murals throughout Putnam County as part of the Putnam County Mural Festival. Set for Sept. 7-21, the festival will culminate with a celebration in Greencastle on Saturday, Sept. 21.
Up next is American-born, Spanish-based artist Emily Eldridge.
Originally from the United States, artist Emily Eldridge has spent the better part of the last 18 years living abroad – with an 11-year stint in Hong Kong before moving to Europe in 2016. She is currently based in Barcelona, Spain, where she works as a full-time artist. Emily has a BFA in Illustration from SCAD in Savannah, Georgia, a Master in Creative Illustration from BAU Centro Universitario de Diseño y Arte, (Barcelona) and a Master in Graphic Design from EINA Centro Universitario de Diseño (Barcelona, 2018).
Her creative work spans a variety of media – from murals to street art, editorial illustration, environmental graphics, neon lights and more. She uses bold color and graphic forms to create playful imagery with an element of humor and wit. Emily has worked with some of the top clients in the industry including Spotify, Target, The New York Times and Visa.
Eldridge will be installing a mural on the Criss Construction building in Greencastle that faces Micaela Cancilla Park, and on the basketball court in Maple Berry Park.
Q: Why did you want to create a mural in Putnam County?
A: I think that small towns and rural areas are equally deserving of public art as big cities and are often overlooked. Public art should be enjoyed and accessible to all! I’m excited for the opportunity to create something special for the community there.
Q: What excites you about the specific location of your mural?
A: I like that my wall is quite “human-scaled” and will be easy for people to interact with. As much as I love painting huge walls, it’s also really nice to paint something at a more accessible scale.
Q: How do you hope people will engage with your art?
A: I hope that it will encourage people to pause their day for a moment and discover something unexpected. I hope my work creates an opportunity for surprise and delight. We all need a bit more of that in our everyday life!
Q: How did you get into mural creation? How long have you been doing it?
A: I started out as an illustrator and studied at SCAD (The Savannah College of Art & Design) so that background informs a lot of what I do today. Through illustration and painting, my work started to grow from my sketchbook to small canvases, and then bigger canvases, and eventually I thought about what it would look like on a wall. The first time I actually painted a mural was in 2008. A friend who owned a bar let different artists paint its facade each month, and I approached him about painting my work there. He asked me to send him a sketch, said yes, and the rest is history. I was immediately hooked! From that moment, I began sharing my work online, and slowly started to get more mural and illustration commissions.
I kept my full time job until 2016 when I decided to take a leap and go to graduate school. From there, things really exploded and I was able to devote more time to developing and improving my work. In 2019 I began to work as a freelancer full time and have been a working artist since then.
Q: What inspires your art?
A: I’ve always been really inspired by street art and graffiti culture, particularly the “Beautiful Losers” movement from the late 1990s, when street art really started to be taken seriously. In early-internet days, magazines like Juxtapoz, Anthem, Nylon, The Fader and others were still an absolute lifeline to what was happening in culture, and it was there that I first saw the work of Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen, who were a part of this movement and were a huge influence on my early work. Kilgallen was probably the first ever female muralist I was ever aware of, and I’d never seen anything like her monumental paintings of women. Over the years my inspirations have grown and changed, but a lot of it is rooted in these underground cultures that started out of pure passion.
Q: What’s your next project?
A: I’ll soon be working on a site-specific hotel room installation in Mallorca, Spain! It’s always fun to have an unusual “canvas” and to work within a unique set of parameters.