Kevin Bates works on his mural portraits on a building on Frazier Avenue.Twenty feet off the ground, Kevin Bates strokes a brush coated in dark paint along the uneven brick of a building on Frazier Avenue.
Motorists drive by, some peeping over to catch the man at work. Overhead, the likenesses of three men tower above Bates as he works. Because of the nature of the project, he’s not allowed to say who they are.
“Like all good things, I stumbled into this work,” Bates said.
While hoping only for an easy “A” in his high school art class, Bates discovered his knack for drawing. After he displayed a few of his paintings inside a restaurant, his work began to draw attention. But his faces have gathered the most.
“My thought was, if I did a picture of a house or a tree — well, it could be any house or tree,” Bates said. “But if it were a face — specifically, a famous face — you would know, looking at it, if it looked right or not. I wanted to see if other people could recognize the faces I was painting. Turns out, most can. Not all, but most.”