Rebecca Graves has made a career of painting large-scale murals and decorative painting in New York City.

Since 2015, Graves has painted murals and graphics for exhibitions at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York. She recently added BRIC Arts Center in Brooklyn to her portfolio of exhibition-related murals. She is also the creative director at R Graves & Company, producing high-end faux finishes for private and corporate clients in Manhattan.

Her other notable clients include the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where she worked on the team producing the Sol LeWitt retrospective in 2000; Cunard Lines Ltd., for whom she designed and produced special event designs for the Queen Mary 2, Queen Elizabeth 2, and Queen Victoria ships; Tavern on the Green for decorative painting and gilding; the Atlanta Arts Festival, where she created public art transit posters advocating human rights; and the Saginaw-Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, for whom she designed and produced large-scale murals based on their tribal designs.

Graves earned a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1990, where she expanded her work to include public art and installations. She received a BFA in Painting from the Louisville School of Art.

She has exhibited her paintings and murals in New York at Smack Mellon Gallery, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Brooklyn College; at Sculpture Key West; and internationally at the Universidad in Mexico City.

Statement

Over the many months I spent at sea, I spent hours staring at the vast space of the ocean.

Each day was a unique palette, with the wind, the rain, and the sunlight affecting the water and sky. Clear days offered only shades of Prussian blue and cadmium green. The ocean’s color shifted constantly—sometimes a deep cobalt, sometimes pale ultramarine—with clouds parting to let sunlight reflect off wave tops, creating flashes of white. The water, always in motion, never revealed what lay beneath, yet the perfection of the distant horizon line remained constant.

I most loved extended days at sea with no land in sight. I imagined all the sailors at sea since humans first built boats and left home, sailing on and on for months and years with only the expanse of the sea and the sun, moon, and stars as their map.

The storms at sea were unforgettable, with waves beating the ship like a drum and tossing anything unsecured. The deep blue-black fury of nighttime storms would turn to pale green calm at dawn, followed by days of gentle gray fog with no glimpse of the horizon. There were rare days of no wind when the sea looked like glass, and the cloudless sky and sea became one.

The vast space of the ocean.