She’s back.
The internationally acclaimed mural artist who captivated Eufaulans’ imagination five years ago has been invited to paint an encore mural inside the Cucina Italiana Al Lago, at 134 N. Main St.
Tracy Lee Stum and her husband Sayak Mitra are hard at work creating the scene of an Italian village on the east wall of the Italian restaurant’s interior.
It may be finished as early as Friday, May 30.
Tracy and Sayak completed a mural on Selmon Road on Sept. 30, 2020, and since then have been involved in numerous projects around the country.
However, at the moment her most important project is getting a Master of Arts Management (MAM) degree at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh to aid her in running her growing art business.
“My husband and I moved to Pittsburgh last year,” she said.
Tracy is familiar with Pennsylvania. Stum earned a bachelor’s degree at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, after which she continued her studies in naturalism at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy.
She began street painting in 1998 and is considered by many to be one of the finest street painters today.
She said she was motivated to enroll in graduate school by her husband when he was in graduate school.
“He was having so much fun that when he was getting closer to finishing, I thought maybe I was pushing him to go to graduate school all these years,because it was really me wanting to go myself,” she said.
She chose CMU to enhance her business knowledge.
She has completed the first year of the twoyear program.
“I’m hoping when I get out of school, I’ll bring enough skill and knowledge and innovation to expand my business a little bit and maybe change up some of the models,” she said.
She has already made one change that has sped up the creative process.
At the outset of the mural project Tracy wore a Virtual Reality headset to visualize the drawing on the wall and used that visualization to outline the scene.
“I can see what’s in the computer, on my screen, and I can also see the background. So, I have an app that I put into the VR headset and so will not need to create drawings.
I can put any drawing in there and it will basically size it to any size I want it to,” she said. “And then I don’t have to spend time putting up a grid or putting up some trap cartoons or anything like that that takes a long time.
“I got all this done in maybe like two and a half hours.”
Otherwise, it might have taken days.
This is the first time she has tried the technical approach, and she is very pleased.
“It’s a game changer. Absolutely,’ she said.
She only uses it to sketch the outline. She paints the old-fashioned way.
Tracy has a youthful exuberance for her work.
“I’m with a lot of young people in school, in their 20s and 30s. It’s really interesting to see their perspective on the world,” she said.
She’s working on this project during the school break. When she finishes this one the couple will head for Joplin, Mo., for another one.
