Wonder walls

Winnie-the-Pooh one minute, Angry Birds the next. Throw in the Teesside skyline and a pub featuring dogs playing darts and you get an insight into the working life of Lindsey Coxon.

The Stockton-based artist and mum-of-three offers an alternative to wallpaper and plain old emulsion by painting bespoke wall murals. Most of her commissions are for children’s bedrooms, nurseries and schools, but her work can also be seen in hospitals, pubs and businesses around the North-East, including murals of the Teesside skyline and Newcastle Quayside.

It was while she was re-decorating her eldest son’s bedroom in 2011 that she came up with the idea for Custom Murals. With a degree in Textile and Surface Pattern Design, Lindsey has a background in the textile industry, designing wallpapers and furnishing fabrics for national and international markets. But after giving up work to bring up her sons, Lewis, now 13 and twins Ewan and James, 11, she was looking for a new opportunity.

“I was redecorating Lewis’s bedroom and he was really into Dennis the Menace and asked me to do the whole room in the red and black stripes,” she recalls. “It’s only a little bedroom and I thought it would be too much, so I said I’ll do one wall like that, we’ll leave the others a lighter colour, and as a compromise, I said I would paint Dennis on one of the walls. I found an image of Dennis bursting through a page and while I was painting, I had a lightbulb moment and thought this would be a really good opportunity for a business.”

Lewis was so pleased with Dennis the Menace, Lindsey had a go at the twins’ room and painted Super Mario. After building a portfolio and painting on canvases which she could show at craft fairs, she began to get commissions for children’s bedrooms and nurseries, especially from couples who were expecting their first baby and wanted to make the nursery really special. Since then, she has had all kinds of requests from Finding Nemo to The Lion King, Angry Birds and Frozen.

Lindsey says one of the highlights is seeing children's faces when they walk into the room and see it for the first time. “It’s lovely to see them come in, especially when it has been a surprise,” she says. “I did one of superheroes, like Marvel characters, bursting through the wall. It was a birthday present for a little boy and his mum told him that someone was in his room filling in a hole in his wall and he had to keep out. She couldn’t wait to show him and it was lovely to see him come in, he was really excited and surprised.”

Lindsey normally paints directly onto the wall, but will occasionally paint on canvas, especially if a family is planning to move. “You’re limited with the size with a canvas, but at least it can go with them when they move,” she says.

Aside from comic characters and a giant logo of Middlesboro FC (requested by one superfan), inspirational quotes are very popular. One teenager wanted lyrics from an Enrique Iglesias song. Another lady had the Oscar Wilde quote “Pleasure without champagne is purely artificial” painted on the wall of her sun room. Someone else – a fashion lover - had “Every day is a fashion show and the world is your runway” on the wall of her dressing room.

As well as homes, Lindsey gets a lot of requests from schools to do educational murals such as maps and timelines or a ‘Tree of Hope’ for children to write their hopes and dreams on. The largest was a history timeline for Oakdene Primary in Stockton which stretched more than 12m wide all the way down the corridor. “I tailor it to what each school’s needs are,” says Lindsey. “Famous inspirational quotes are popular. I paint the words then put some nice colourful images to go with them so it’s inspiring for the children to read.”

Apart from a giant postcard for an exhibition at the Museum of Hartlepool, one of the quirkiest commissions came from the Cleveland Bay pub in Redcar which commissioned her to paint a mural of dogs playing pool reflecting the characteristics of some of the customers. “There was quite a big space so we did dogs serving at a bar and dogs playing poker and playing darts,” she says.

One of the pictures is accompanied by a quote from darts legend Sid Waddell: “You can get the dart player out of the pub, but you can’t get the pub out of the dart player”.

The landlord wanted to tie it in with customers and asked if the dogs could wear specific glasses, hats and clothes to represent the regulars. It proved such a hit, Lindsey was asked to go back and paint the pillars and a further wall featuring dogs playing dominoes.

“Everybody loves it,” she says. “It has gone down really well. It’s a real conversation starter.”

W: custommurals.co.uk