Photo Credit: Breonny Lee
BY Taylor Adams Cogan
When Steve Hunter studied art in Glasgow, he honed his craft and considered his future. What the Scottish native didn’t anticipate was that he’d thrive by painting the walls of an urban neighborhood in Texas.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to work big, but it’s not like you could be a professional muralist,” he says of the time in Scotland. “It didn’t really exist as a recognized thing. People kind of looked down on it, I guess. But I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
He did some mural work in the UK, but things were “smaller” – the country, the “kind of mindset,” and the budgets, he says. “Budgets weren’t really what they were here in the States. I wasn’t really getting by. Then, I had the chance to come to Texas.”
He’s made Dallas his home since 2004, thanks to a gig that first brought him to Oak Cliff for mural work. An opportunity to teach kept him here for another three years, and thankfully, he met his wife, Mischelle, who sealed the deal. He kept teaching for six years but left when he missed painting full-time. He says it’s been easier for him to pursue his type of art than in the UK.
“I enjoy it, apart from the 100-degree heat,” he says. “Scotland and Texas are two very different things. I think you can fit Scotland into Texas 10 times. When I first came over, it was real Texas hospitality; everybody was crazy friendly, and everything was bigger. The food was ridiculous, five times the portion.
“Cars were a culture shock. Dallas is a car city. There are cars everywhere. Why isn’t there a sidewalk?” he says, coming from Scotland where there’s public transportation and people generally walk a great deal more to get around than in North Texas.
But the Texas charm of the people and the work kept him happy. He started his own business, Hunter Creates, and shortly afterward, he received a call that would take him to Deep Ellum.
“Club Dada had been closed for years; they wanted to do a mural in it to test the waters,” he says. “It’s a porcelain doll, cracked ‘Da-Da,’ it’s kind of creepy, but that was my first mural in Deep Ellum.”
The reaction was better than good. Commissions came in, and he started to see that he could sustain himself through his creative work.
“I’ve always hung out in Deep Ellum. You can paint, not anything you want, but a more open kind of theme, like ‘Do a portrait,’ and you get to do whatever,” he says. “So I did Stevie Ray Vaughan. That went kind of viral.”
More people across the city found the value of public art on private walls, and that attention kept Steve in business, with Deep Ellum continuing to be good to him, he says. He’s still doing work in the neighborhood – you can find his more recent, stunning work on Blues Alley and at Black Swan (2.0).
Steve has seen Deep Ellum change in the 20 years he’s been here, watching businesses come and go or sustain and thrive. But the constant thread has been the neighborhood’s support of artists – and the artists keeping Deep Ellum special.
“Deep Ellum is still the art hub for artists and musicians. If you want to open a restaurant or small business, Deep Ellum has always been that fun and creative place,” he says. “The most creative part of Dallas is Deep Ellum.
