On my podcast I met Henrique Nardi, one of the artists involved with the Madison Mural on Monroe St. I asked him about how the project got started and what was the inspiration for the design.
How did this mural get started?
It started with Liu's [Triangulador's] invitation. He had that arranged with [the building owner's] already and he was looking for a partner to help him out with the mural. We started talking about different ideas for the mural and we partnered up.
How did you and Triangulador meet?
He reached out to me I think? He saw some of my stuff online and then he invited me to check out his studio. I went there one day, we talked a lot, like hours of talking, about our stories and what brought us to Madison, comparing styles and talking about collaboration from the beginning even before talking about the actual mural. Then eventually he mentioned the mural and asked me if I was up to it. I was like yes definitely! I would love to collab on that.
How did you guys come up with the design that you ended up using on the wall?
Liubov [Triangulador] already wanted to do a mural that would show his pattern style that he's been doing on mattresses and his paintings. Like, he has a pretty consistent pattern style and he wanted to do a mural showing that as well. But he wanted to also have something with a message like the lettering within that mural and this is my expertise.
At first, we considered using the word "Monroe" because of Monroe street. But then eventually we switched that to "Madison" and he was like okay!
So we got this big word, let's try to think of ways to represent that word in a more interesting unique way. I was looking for references on the sign painting style that's quite popular on the boats in the Amazon region in Brazil. It became something of a reference to use on this project and because I'm from Brazil and Liu is from Mexico we wanted to make a mural that had Latin American influences and I was looking at the Amazon region as a reference.
Listen to the entire episode of the podcast here - https://www.tomrayswebsite.com/2020/10/henrique-nardi-graphic-designer-type.html