Manuel Murillo

Manuel Murillo was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and drew everywhere as a child. Before he could talk properly he would replay a VHS clip of a shark leaping out of the water after a seal, over and over, until he could draw it himself.

He studied visual arts at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) in Mexico, though most of his education has come from practice: painting as much as possible, and still learning.

His first taste of scale came by accident. His father opened a small business in Puerto Vallarta and let him paint the walls. He filled them with colour and a large tree that changed the feeling of the whole room. A drawing lives on paper. A mural changes a place people walk into.

At twenty, he and his mother migrated to Los Angeles. He kept painting, made commissioned work through a gallery in Long Beach, and spent several years in construction, learning how walls and buildings actually go together.

Ottawa became home. Through Murillo Murals he has painted more than 20 murals across Ontario for restaurants, businesses, homes, community organizations and public spaces, from small interiors to a wall about twenty-five metres long inside a grocery store.

His work moves between portraiture, illustration, botanical imagery, architecture and playful storytelling, with Mexican and Latin American influences running through it. His approach changes with the wall. A mural might need to be loud, or restrained, or nostalgic, and he is not interested in repeating one formula.

Commercial work matters to him beyond paying for the rest. He grew up the son of business owners and likes helping a local place become somewhere people remember.

Through Murillo Studio he makes more personal work about migration, queer identity, memory and moving between places. Commercial work starts with someone else's brief. This starts with his own.

He also works in queer health and wellness in Ottawa, paints for community fundraisers and runs painting workshops. As a gay Mexican migrant artist, he pays attention to whose faces appear in public space.

He still approaches a wall the way that kid approached the shark on the VHS tape: looking closely, figuring out how it works, and wanting to draw it.