Artist Wayne Rogers explains the link between his day job and his GreenWise Market mural.

While studying architecture at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina, Wayne needed to take a visual arts class, so he signed up for the only one he could get into: painting. That class led to a lifelong passion.

“I loved the activity, the late nights in the studio and how painting could be more abstract than architecture,” he said.

Wayne steers his art away from anything related to his daily work of creating buildings, preferring to capture the light or mood of what he sees outdoors. But that doesn’t mean he completely forgets the skills and training he uses as an architect. In fact, they helped him come up with the visual structure of the mural for #1710, Lexington, South Carolina.

“An architect’s role is to create order in the environment,” he said. “I needed to bring order to the panels to tell one story. Sometimes I would rearrange them as I worked because they made more sense in a different sequence.”

“Tapestries: Lives Woven Together in Community” is made up of 48 individual 15- by 12-inch canvases. A horizontal line through the middle doubles as both the surface of a nearby lake and a metaphor for what ties the town together. Boats float above the line, while fish swim through the water below. Wayne used only seven colors, mixing the paint with sand and applying it with a palette knife to create texture and depth.

“When you look at the painting, it has more meaning each time you see it,” Wayne said.