Carmen Mazick has never been to Tuscany, Italy’s central region famous for wine, olives, and sandstone architecture. Still, it inspired the color scheme inside her North Side home tucked into a cul-de-sac behind Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library’s Oaklyn Branch. She relied on the talents of Kathy Small, a self-taught painter, to bring that vision to life.
“I’m not a neutral-white-beige person. … I wear color, I drive color, I live in color,” Mazick says.
“She’s so curious about everything,” Small says of Mazick. “She … gives you lots of inspiration.”
The two met as members of a stitching club — the “Stitchers” — more than a decade ago. When Mazick discovered Small could paint, she excitedly showed Small pictures of the murals she wanted in her guest and primary bathrooms. In her primary bath- room, Mazick wanted to depict a Greek goddess statue she’d seen painted on the HGTV show “Room by Room.”
The painting from “Room by Room,” “just really spoke to me,” says Mazick, a North High School graduate. “… It’s been at least 30 years. But I was hoping that eventually I could have that.”
Small, an alumna of Harrison High School, began to “play with my paints” on the house’s walls, creating various two-toned effects throughout much of the space. Next came the subtly visible Greek goddess in the primary bath.
“That’s basically a tone on tone. I’d already painted the walls, and I then did the darker color outlining her and then shading her on top of it,” Small explains.
“Carmen sees it every day when she puts her makeup on and gets dressed.”
The guest bathroom mural was modeled after a picture Mazick found on the internet depicting Tuscan scenery. After finishing the goddess, Small focused on this mural, painting with shades of blue, green, tan, brown, and plum peeking out from an open, arched doorway. The resulting landscape evokes the sense of embarking on a stroll through the Tuscan countryside, complete with Mediterranean cypress trees, silverbush star jasmine, rolling hills, and an earthen path. The murals took two months to complete.
“Carmen always had her vision … always knew what she wanted,” Small says. “Even though it’s in the bathroom, you don’t see it all the time. It’s nice to have when you go into a really nondescript area,” Mazick says. “Kathy would sit there and look at the picture and turn around and draw it on the wall … and to get the proportions right, that requires skill.”
