Original article published by The Gleaner, photos by MaCabe Brown and Chuck Stinnett.

Downtown Henderson’s third mural art project was wrapping up Friday — and it evidently won’t be the last.

The latest mural has ties to the three-story piece painted in 2018 on the western wall of the Hilliard Lyons (now Baird) office building at Second and North Elm streets.

Henderson native and lifelong artist Maddy Fritz spent more than 100 hours helping professional California muralist Leah Tumerman paint that mural two years ago as part of The Perch pocket park project in the 200 block of Second Street.

Now, Fritz has designed her own mural and, with help from friends and family, has been painting for days now.

Unlike Tumerman’s mural, Fritz’s is a little more difficult to spot. It covers a 10-foot-tall by at least 20-foot-wide space on a northern wall at the back of the Bugg Realty building at 17 S. Main St. It can be glimpsed from Water Street but is more visible from the Water Street parking lots behind the U.S. Post Office and the Henderson County Judicial Center.

“It’s somewhat hidden but it kind of encourages people to explore downtown a little more, which is cool,” Lindsay Locasto, executive director of the Downtown Henderson Partnership, said.

Like the Second Street mural, Fritz’s mural, dubbed "Nourish," is modern and open to interpretation. It features a pair of open hands that seemingly release a sunflower and a butterfly in front of a large orange ball — a setting sun, perhaps — along with glimpses of a distant galaxy and bands of color stripes that bring to mind light refracting through prisms.

“I can’t really tell you what it is,” Fritz said. “You just have to see it. It’s not really any one thing,” and in fact includes elements from multiple concepts she designed in the past.

“I like to hear what people interpret it to be,” she said.

Fritz said she picked up tips from Tumerman, such as working only with premium paint that’s specifically engineered for outdoor murals, saving some paint brushes until the end so she can finish the mural with clean brushes — even taking out liability insurance.

But she also brings years of art experience, including college training and professional experience, to this undertaking.

“She started drawing horses when she was very young,” her mother, Debra Fritz, said as she helped her paint on Tuesday. “It was her favorite thing from when she was five or six.”

Maddy Fritz studied drawing in high school and took a variety of drawing, painting and digital art and design classes in college, graduating from Georgetown College in 2013 with an art major with an emphasis in graphic design.

She worked as a graphic artist at Georgetown after graduating, then spent nearly four years as marketing director for the Henderson Tourist Commission. Fritz has worked as a digital designer for Redstitch Digital in Evansville since mid-2019, creating logos and other artwork for clients.

Her mother believes she also inherited talent from her grandmother Jean Fritz, who taught tole painting to customers at the family’s former Ben Franklin store in Eastgate Shopping Center that included a large arts and crafts department.

The 2018 mural project got into Fritz’s blood.

“I’ve wanted to (do this) ever since I worked with Leah on Second Street,” Fritz said Tuesday afternoon while she painted details on her mural with her mother, Debra Fritz. “Doing that gave me the confidence I could do it.”

Oct. 6, 2020 Chuck Stinnett.jpg — “People didn’t even ask… to see the design… they already knew what it meant to me.”

Maddy Fritz

She was searching for permission to paint on somebody’s building earlier this year at the same time that Emily Hunter, owner of Henderson Juice Co. at 12 S. Main St., was hunting for someone to paint fruit art on the walls of her shop.

“Almost everybody recommended her,” Hunter said of Fritz. “She just came in and looked and came up with her idea,” ultimately painting a variety of citrus on the walls — grapefruits, lemons, limes and oranges while the shop was shut down for an expansion in August.

“I said, ‘I’ll do the inside murals for free if you can find me an outside wall,’” Fritz said.

That outside wall turned out to be right next door in a building owned by Kent Preston, who agreed to let Fritz paint on the north wall of his building and has given Grace Henderson permission to paint another mural on the south wall.

“Hers goes up next spring, so it’s exciting,” Fritz said of Henderson.

Fritz has heard of yet other mural projects being planned around Downtown Henderson and speaks of them with nearly as much enthusiasm as she does her own.

For this mural, she launched a Facebook fundraiser, hoping to raise $1,000 to pay for paint and other supplies. “I hit that in less than 24 hours, so it was pretty cool,” she said. Ultimately, friends and family donated $1,800 for her project.

“People didn’t even ask where it was going or to see the design,”: Fritz said., “It means a lot; they already knew what it meant to me.”

As with the 2018 mural, this has been a bit of a community undertaking.

“You almost can’t do everything by yourself,” said Fritz, who has been happy to have pals such as lifelong friend and “art buddy” Laurel Humbert-Stock come back to Henderson to help out. Grace Henderson also helped her get the mural started, such as chalking the outline of the design on the brick wall.

“I’ve had a lot of volunteers — at least a dozen,” Fritz said. “I’ll paint their names on it.”

DHP’s Locasto — who along with Henderson Tourist Commission Executive Director Abby Dixon painted downtown’s second mural, a colorful geometric pattern on the concrete pier of the railroad overpass on North Main Street last spring — applauded Fritz and the growing number of pieces of public art downtown.

“For our organization it’s so important because DHP helped a lot with the Perch mural project,” Locasto said. “Part of the goal of that project was to hopefully inspire other local artists in the community to create murals downtown or around the community.

“Maddy was involved with the mural project at The Perch and learned a lot from Leah, so whenever she came forward and talked about her doing a mural project, there was not much concern because people knew she had the experience and the knowledge …

“It’s such a great thing for downtown because we have quite a few beautification projects around downtown,” Locasto said. “… I hope it has that ripple effect. Right now you can walk and find three (murals downtown); three years ago, you couldn’t find one.”

Murals in public spaces become popular "selfie" spots. Fritz said she'd like people to use the hashtag #TheNourishMural when they add their photos featuring the mural to social media

“It’s a nice pop of color, year-round,” Grace Henderson, a multi-disciplinary artist, said. “In summer in Kentucky, everything is green and very vivid and very bright, but the rest of the year you don’t have those colors, so it’s nice to insert these pockets of color around the community so when you walk past, you’re happy. Murals make people happy” — and, she said, make art available to people who aren’t comfortable visiting an art gallery.

Pursuing such a passion takes lots of time: design, logistical planning, transferring an outline on paper to a wall at larger scale and, of course, days and days of often-meticulous painting. Fritz calculates that she put in 100 to 120 hours on the mural, not counting her volunteers’ time.

The torn jeans she wears while painting testify to all those hours; they bear dozens of blotches of various colors of paint she has wiped off her fingers over the days and weeks of work.

But Fritz said she doesn’t have mural painting out of her system yet.

Along with helping Grace Henderson on her mural next spring, “I’ll have to do another one next year,” she said. “I’ll have to do another one until I run out of walls to paint.”

“Or run out of volunteers,” her mother added.

New selfie spot? Latest Downtown Henderson mural takes shape behind Main St.