REALISTICALLY WHIMSICAL WITH MURAL ARTIST BANKS COMPTON

Banks Compton is always looking for an excuse to chat; it's one of the reasons painting murals suits him so well.

"I love painting murals and having people in the community stop by and talk to me," Compton said. "That's probably my favorite way to work is just explain what I'm doing, teach them about how I paint something that large and learn more about where these people are from. That, to me, is super gratifying."

Compton, a full-time mural artist living in Foley, Ala., loves how accessible murals are as an art form.

"Murals serve as a relatively inexpensive way to really transform an area," Compton said. "It makes walking safer; murals actually slow down traffic because people are looking at the artwork. It puts a smile on people's faces. I think they do a lot of communal good."

Compton often finds himself in Pensacola,

By Savannah Evanoff

though, with friends he has made here. His goal is to paint a mural in all 50 states; so far, he's done four: Alabama, Mississippi, Arizona and Rhode Island.

Spoiler alert—he hopes Florida is next—maybe even Pensacola.

Compton will have a solo show at The Studio by Sarah Coleman Photography downtown this Friday, March 3, to demonstrate what he can do, showing off his smaller works and raffling off a 15-by-15-foot mural.

He will also paint a temporarily staged mural at CUBED, a two-day outdoor live mural painting performance outside of the Pensacola Museum of Art.

One of Compton's latest murals was for Alabama One Credit Union, which has 18 branches across the state.

"I finished my first mural for them in Tuscaloosa, and I'm working with the CEO of the company to hopefully be doing murals for the rest of their branches," Compton said. "(I'm) trying to help draw people into learning more about things like financial literacy through being attracted to things like art."

Compton didn't start out painting on walls. His first dabble in art was selling pet portraits in high school.

And it did well—so well, in fact, he was able to buy his first car at 16. It was a red 1997 Pontiac Sunfire convertible.

"It was a horrible car though because it was a convertible," Compton said. "It was freezing in the wintertime and hot in the summertime. And it leaked every time it rained, so I carried towels in my car. The seatbelts didn't really work. And I had no brights on my headlights. But it got me places."

It certainly did.

Through his high school hustle, Compton realized art was something he could make a living at. He was then accepted into the Rhode Island School of Design—one of the top art schools in the country—so he got his GED and dropped out to pursue a degree in painting.

While in college, he interned for a luxuryevent-planning company in New York building décor. Unfortunately, he and two of his friends lost their jobs during the pandemic.

"We took a road trip out west just to see of other places we could start over," Compton said.

They started in Fort Walton Beach and drove west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, with Compton ultimately settling in Phoenix, Ariz. There, he stumbled upon mural artist Taylor Victoria Nelson (@taylor.victoria.art).

"I messaged her on Instagram, and I just said, 'I'm tall; can I come help you paint a mural?'" Compton said.

At 6-foot-2-inches, it was enough of a selling point for her to accept.

"We just became best friends, and I started helping her for all of her mural projects," Compton said.

After working alongside Nelson for a while, he scored his first solo gig doing a mural in Linden, Ala., near where he grew up. That area's largely responsible, too, for his love of murals.

Compton grew up on a "farm"—he says with air quotes, because it's not a working farm.

"We just have a little bit of land, and we call it the farm," Compton said. "So I've spent a lot of time outdoors. I love being outside. A lot of things in my paintings come from my family farm. There's different family objects and things that have become reoccurring symbols in my work. There's a lot of landscapes that come from that area, that talk about subjects coming from the regional south."

Spending the first 10 years of his life near the Mardi Gras festivities in Mobile also contributed to his proclivity for large-scale art, he said. And his aunt was a ballet dancer.

"My childhood was filled with building props for her ballet dance recitals that she would put on for her students," Compton said. "And that element of whimsy has always kind of followed me."

Compton's style is technically American regionalist—you can google it, he said. That's an "art nerdy term," so he prefers to call it "realistically whimsical."

"I like whimsical distortions of nature and landscapes," Compton said. "I love telling stories and narratives, and I'm doing more of that in my murals now than I originally started off with. But I love being able to tell a sto - ry through paint, and so I'm trying to do more of that. But as of lately, I just like to do things in a whimsical way."

His upcoming solo show will feature smaller paintings, some with accompanying stories he collected in a diary he kept during the pandemic. He was in Italy at the time, working for another artist for his college's European honors program.

"We got along really well, and there were whispers of a flulike thing going around," Compton said. "He was like, 'It's fine, whatever.' And then our school called and said that we had to come home like immediately."

The artist offered Compton a room in his apartment, thinking it would "blow over in two weeks."

"It was so happening so quickly," Compton said. "I was like, 'OK, I'm gonna go home, and then I'm gonna come back when this is all over, and then I'm going to get that working visa and stay.' Thank God I didn't do it, because when we were in the air, they closed off all travel to Italy. I went right back home to my family farm near Demopolis, Ala. I grew up pretty much isolated, so it was like back to normal for a couple weeks, almost a month, before anything was weird again."

Reintegrating into society was the weirder part.

But Compton accurately describes himself as bubbly and outgoing, and his work reflects it. You'd have to dig pretty far back in the archives for something really angsty, he said.

Painting plays a role in that.

"Art, for me, is just a way of really working through a lot of my emotions and things," Compton said. "It's just externalizing those things and being able to look at them after I create them. I feel like it's a great way to work through stuff. I'm just really happy and grateful for where I am, and that's why being bubbly and happy is so easy for me. I feel like to have a great attitude about things is just to show gratitude for what I do have. I feel really fortunate in so many ways."

Compton's small, tight-knit family has always been supportive. They're truly the only reason he's able to do art full time, he said.

"Doing those pet portraits in high school, not only did my family support me, but even my community in that small town supported me," Compton said. "Everyone has always been super encouraging, and that's just what has made becoming an artist really possible for me. I'm really grateful for my family and the communities I've been able to surround myself with." {in}

Banks Compton Solo Show

WHAT: A solo show featuring new paintings

WHEN: 5-9 p.m., Friday, March 3

WHERE: The Studio by Sarah Coleman

Photography, 518 N. Ninth Ave.

COST: Free

DETAILS: bankscompton.com