Echo Azure Butterflies & Marsh Marigolds
2024 Street Wise Mural Festival
Location: Retaining wall along Goose Creek Path near 4847 Pearl St Boulder, CO 80301
Photos by Dona and Niko Laurita, and Cam Margera
Assisted by Amy Broman
Check out K. Vuletich’s Echo Azure Butterflies & Marsh Marigolds painted during #SWMF2024! This mural encourages viewers to pay attention to and appreciate the beautiful life that thrives all around us in nature.
Bustles of Marsh Marigolds complete with fiery orange centers, yellow petals, and surrounding green leaves adorn the wall against swaths of varying shades of purple. Echo Azure Butterflies flutter throughout the scene, gently landing on the flowers to take part in the process of pollination. These butterflies have wings of glowing light blue often dotted with dark black spots.
K. often finds the pollinator pair of the Echo Azure Butterfly (pollinator) and Marsh Marigold (pollinizer) while hiking subalpine and alpine lakes. They are among the many species that made her fall in love with nature. In reality, these butterflies often remain unnoticed due to their small size and plain appearance, while the marigolds are so ubiquitous and grow so low to the ground that they fade into the background. However, K. presents the pair as much larger than life size in their mural, helping the viewer appreciate their natural beauty.
The clusters of images with bold yellow outlines appear like giant botanical stickers on the wall. The artist frequently uses the stencil (or pounce) method to transfer their designs to the wall, a method also utilized by Renaissance artists like Boticelli. First K. draws their design on a large sheet of butcher paper and perforates the design using a perforating wheel.Then the artist tapes the paper on the wall and uses a pounce pad to push chalk through the perforated design. K. prefers this method because they like to paint within organic shapes rather than perfect squares or rectangles. The stencils allow them to create the sticker-like effect in their murals.
Shoutout to K. for pivoting last minute when the original wall assigned to them was not ready due to construction! They were flexible in brainstorming a different design for a completely different wall.
Artist Bio:
K. Vuletich is a Denver-based multimedia artist. While studying at Regis University under the mentorship of Tony Ortega, Vuletich became interested in mixed media collage. In 2015, they began working at Urban Peak, a shelter that serves youth experiencing homelessness, as a case manager and art group facilitator. This experience cemented their appreciation for accessibility to the arts and taught them art, at its best, is an inclusive and empowering practice. Since then, Vuletich has sought to make art more accessible to aspiring young artists and more affordable for interested collectors and the public.
Vuletich was a recipient of Art Gym’s Create residency in 2018 and was selected for Denver Arts and Venue’s Urban Arts Fund in 2019. These grants gave Vuletich the opportunity to expand their collaborations within communities and to experiment with large-scale, low-barrier public art.
Currently, Vuletich seeks to involve community stakeholders at every stage of creative development. Though they often layer diverse imagery to create large collage-style murals, Vuletich is particularly passionate about nature and sustainability. Whenever they can, they incorporate images of regional fauna and flora into their work and try to be particularly mindful of the materials they are using. Though Vuletich loves creating physical artworks, they consider their primary creative passion to be cultivating community.