If you spot two men in neon shirts suspended in the air while spray painting the Marriott in downtown Long Beach, don’t worry, it’s Brian Peterson and his brother Sean working on an 86-foot-tall mural for a long-running local art festival.
In the afternoon, the Petersons have battled winds that send their outdoor lift swaying roughly two to three feet at a time.
Sean is the voice of reason when the gusts kick up, urging them to get back on solid ground, but Brian always wants to keep pushing through. They’re working on a tight deadline during a weeklong arts festival put on by the local nonprofit Creative Class Collective.
When it’s done, the 12-story painting will show a child blowing bubbles in vibrant colors.
“The idea here is ‘chase dreams as a kid chases bubbles,’” Brian said. “It’s an encouragement to not let disappointment or failure stop you, but to always remain childlike.”
It’s the largest mural Brian has undertaken. His previous high was seven stories.
In the heart of downtown at Pine Avenue and Ocean Boulevard, it promises to be one of the most noticeable murals produced as part of Long Beach Walls and Art Renzie festival, an annual art event that has resulted in more than 100 murals and art installations throughout the city since 2015. (You can see the locations of this year’s murals here.)
Spanish artist Lula Goce painted the festival’s previous tallest mural, a six-story high portrait of a woman surrounded by flowers on the side of a parking garage just across Pacific Avenue from Lincoln Park.
Before Brian ever started painting murals of his own, a friend invited him to ride bikes around Long Beach and check out the murals that had been painted during the 2017 Long Beach Walls.
Working as a designer for Kia Motors and dabbling in canvas painting gave Brian a strong artistic background, and he decided to dive into murals in 2018, after a project painting portraits of people experiencing homelessness in Santa Ana caught the eye of a developer.
The developer wanted a mural of one of Brian’s paintings on a 200-foot wall of a homeless shelter he was building. He asked Brian if this was something he knew how to do.
“I lied and said ‘yes,’” Brian said. “The rest is history.”
He’s since developed a reputation for his murals of Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant. His first was unveiled in 2021 on a wall across from the original Philippe’s sandwich shop in Los Angeles’ Chinatown neighborhood.
Brian has since painted three more murals depicting Bryant, including two featuring Bryant and his daughter Gianna. Bryant and Gianna were killed in a helicopter crash in Calabasas in 2020.
One mural is at Pearson Park in Anaheim and the other is a “Courthedral” painted inside the Nickerson Gardens Gym in Watts.
Brian said he’s had fun working with Bryant’s widow, Vanessa Bryant, on those murals, although she can be a tough critic.
“She’s very detailed in terms of ‘can you make an adjustment here to her nose’ [or] ‘just tweak her tooth a little bit,” Brian said. “This is good because she’s after perfection, just like her husband was.”
Brian said he’s used boom lifts and scissor lifts before, but never the swing stage rig that his Long Beach project now requires.
“You always wonder, ‘Who are those crazy guys up there washing windows?’ And then you become one of the crazies,” Brian said.
Brian has relied on his Christian faith while he’s sometimes unnerved, suspended in the air, racing to finish the project before he’s scheduled to fly home to Miami on Sunday.
Brian and his wife found religion a decade ago after a series of deaths in their respective families.
While reading a non-fiction Christian book, he was inspired to introduce himself to a homeless man nearby who would often scream outside Brian’s Santa Ana apartment.
That led to Brian painting the man’s portrait and eventually painting murals on various homeless shelters throughout Los Angeles.
“It almost feels like fate in a way, like I was supposed to be here,” Brian said. “Eight years ago, that was a seed and the seed has been watered for eight years. Now we have a tree that’s 12 stories tall.”