Style

STYLE Murals In Flight

Amanda Moody, the local artist behind a mural at CLT, finds peace in the process

BY VIRGINIA BROWN

(Above) Moody painted the floor-to-ceiling mural in the American Express Centurion Lounge at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. (Below) Clients can order wallpaper and fabric by the yard with Moody’s original designs. IN 2014, when her daughter was 5, Amanda Moody and her husband hit a rough patch in their marriage. They separated for three years, and she turned to painting as therapy. “It is my saving grace,” she says. “The mediums being so uid and uncontrollable. It’s taught me that you have to let go and just go with the ow.”

Today, the 45-year-old works out of her home studio in Weddington, where she runs Bombshelves, a ne art and surface design business that fashions wallpaper murals, pillows, window treatments, bedding, and more. She and her husband also reconciled. They just celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary.

Bombshelves started as a vintage furniture business. Moody and a friend re nished old pieces with high-gloss lacquer and funky metallics for local antique emporiums like Sleepy Poet and Metrolina Expo. “I started painting to out t the booth, and people started noticing,” Moody recalls. She got a few commissions from that work but credits social media for her visibility: American Express found her on Instagram.

In 2019, the credit giant commissioned her to paint a mural in the Centurion Lounge between the D and E concourses at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Fanciful swirls of dark blue and smoky white, reminiscent of clouds in the night sky, dance throughout the oor-toceiling painting. “They wanted something that was nature-inspired,” she says, “something that would be peaceful to calm travelers.”

Like nature, her work is dynamic and full of color and dimension. Her pieces have appeared at the Mint Museum for a Safe Alliance bene t and Shain Gallery in Myers Park, among others. She also takes commissions for homes and o ces, and before the pandemic, she was in talks with a California hospital to paint different murals for each patient room. Moody hopes she can still work on this project.

She usually paints horizontals on a twodimensional platform, and she incorporates layered epoxy resin with di erent archival paints and pigments, gold or silver leaf, and diamond dust or ne glitter. “As the layers build up, there’s an aha! moment,” she says. “That’s