"RIFLE — Nini Shroyer's workday came to an end as sunlight spilled around the west wall of the Rifle Creek Museum the morning of June 24.
Her hands, along with areas of her faded blue jeans and gray-hooded sweatshirt, were covered by a spectrum of dried paint. It's hard to distinguish where her hand ends and the paintbrush begins.
She'd been working since about 11:30 p.m. the night before. She seemed more relaxed than tired that morning, even after being up all night painting.
“I'm not real uptight about when I start and what time I end,” she said. “I tend to be a workaholic so I don't really care what part of the day or night the hours come out of.”
She just wants to get the work done. Typically, she works between eight and 14 hours a day on a mural. The 40-foot tall west exterior wall of the Rifle Creek Museum has been her canvas since the beginning of April.
“Isn't this looking cool,” she said with a smile on her face.
“Give me a minute to get down so we can talk,” Shroyer said.
Perched in a large steal cage at the end of a hydraulic powered arm on a small boom lift, she maneuvers the bucket to ground level. On the floor of the basket gathers a collection of various-sized cans splattered in paint, similar to her attire.
Shroyer's been working the past week during dark of night, to avoid the heat of the day, trying to complete the project.
“It's really easy actually,” Shroyer said about working at night. “It's much simpler,” with the cooler temperatures, the quiet calmness of the night, and the sun isn't reflecting off the glossy paint making it hard to see.
“I didn't think it would work as good as it does,” she said. “But it's actually better because you can only see what you are working on, everything else is darkness. So, in a way, there are no distractions.”
It's a project that has taken three months of work, but she's nearly finished. By the time this story runs, she's hoping the mural will be complete.
“It's like I'm an addict,” she said of painting.
Shroyer, 51, is a seasoned muralist who has completed works all over the country for the past 35 years. If fact, Shroyer is the muralist who originally painted the wall of the Rifle Creek Museum 25 years ago. But, she said that she was never really satisfied with how the painting came out the first time, and she's wanted to redo it for several years.
“This thing irritated me for years, and years, and years, and years,” she said, “and now it's like OK, now it's not going to irritate me anymore.”
Helen Rogers, manager of the Rifle Downtown Development Authority, acted as liaison between Shroyer and the DDA to update the mural. It's a project that Rogers is very happy to finally have completed.
“It's wonderful,” Rogers said. “It's a great addition and to have it restored by the original artist is great.”
The DDA contracted Shroyer to update the mural for just under $20,000 Rogers said. Funding came from the DDA and the visitor's improvement fund, Rogers said.
“When I did this before I was younger and I didn't have as much experience, and it was like this was intimidating to me,” she confessed. “I had done big things before, but I wasn't real good at portraits, and I would get confused about how to blow things up,” she said about enlarging images on the wall from pictures that she found in old magazines. That is where she draws her inspiration from. She collects photos from old magazines, flyers, and all sorts of print media to fill an endless need for inspiration.
“I collect pictures like crazy because if you go down to the library and are trying to look for a picture you are talking, you could be down there for weeks looking for one stupid picture,” she said.
But, for Shroyer, inspiration comes in many forms.
“You know when you were a little kid and you were riding around with your parents and you see some place out the window of the car and you are like, oh god, I wish I could go there, that place looks so cool?” she said. “It's like the neatest place in the whole world.” That is what she want's to accomplish with her murals.
Art for Shroyer, is trying to recapture that feeling when she paints, so that others feel that emotion when they look at the work.
“It's like you are trying to recreate that feeling,” she said. “It's like you want to give that person, whoever is looking at that, that same feeling they had when they were little kids. Like they are going to miss something if they don't go in there.”
“It's kind of the same with this, you are trying to evoke feelings that people remember,” she said.
She's kind of a stickler for detail. She likes to include a multitude of details, so that everybody can notice something different each time they look at it. Something she remembers doing as a kid.
“It's getting back to the thing about being a little kid,” she said. “I used to look at books my mother brought me with illustrations that had a lot of detail, and when I look at this, I'm doing that again. I'm being a little kid.” " (from July 8, 2010, Citizen Telegram, John Gardner, (
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