Impressionist artist Justin Vining stands in front of the Etna Green mural Monday after just about four hours of working on it. A public unveiling of the completed mural will be from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, July 12.

Text and Photos
By David Slone
Times-Union

ETNA GREEN — When Justin Vining first heard four to five years ago, there was some consideration being given about a new mural in his hometown of Etna Green, he knew he wanted to be on the shortlist of artists considered for it.

Early Monday morning, July 7, he began working on the 8-feet-by-32-feet mural, and within the first four hours people were already remarking on how impressed they were with it.

“I have to admit, it’s so much cooler than I thought it was going to be,” one woman, who declined to provide her name, told Vining. “So much cooler. Wow.”

Vining said being chosen as the artist for the mural is an honor.

“First, it’s an honor. Seriously, when I got wind that there was even a whiff of something like this happening, I became kind of territorial,” he said during a break late Monday morning.

“It’s like, I don’t want someone else doing a mural in my hometown. So I think there was — not a competitive aspect, but there was an aspect of it where I wanted to make sure I was on the shortlist to do it. There was a big desire on my part to do it. I had a ton of interest.”

While murals are not a big portion of Vining’s professional practice, he enjoys doing them and his desire to do Etna Green’s mural was just higher.

“I really wanted to be the person that did it, so I just made sure I kept my name at the top of that list. I said it once, but it really is an honor to do it. I haven’t lived in Etna Green since 1999, and I cannot believe how many people I still know in town … I still feel really connected to the community,” he said.

Hoosier Enduring Legacy Program Kosciusko and the town of Etna Green invite the community to a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the unveiling of the mural on the south side of the Etna Green Post Office, 107 N. Walnut St., from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, July 12. The event is free and all are welcome to attend.

Artist Justin Vining, who graduated from Triton High School in 1999, works on his mural for the town of Etna Green Monday morning. A public unveiling of the completed 8-feet-by-32-feet mural will be from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, July 12.

Vining has developed his impressionist art over the years. Until he was 10 years old, Vining and his family lived in Atwood, specifically Hoffman Lake. When his grandfather retired from farming in 1990, they moved to the farm just north of Etna Green. He graduated from Triton High School in 1999. He finished his undergraduate degree in art education from Purdue in 2004. He taught elementary art from 2004 to 2007 before going to law school, graduating from Valparaiso Law School in 2010, along with his younger brother Nathan.

“The plan after law school was to practice, actually, in Warsaw. My brother and I rented a storefront downtown Warsaw. Long story short, I ended up getting a job offer in Indianapolis doing corporate headhunting, executive recruiting. I took that job late 2010, and I moved to Indianapolis,” Vining said.

He did that job until early May 2011 when he quit to pursue art full time. “So I never practiced law. I passed the bar, but never practiced,” he stated.

Vining had painted through law school just for a secondary source of funds.“It was more necessity, I never thought I was going to be doing this full time. But the success I was seeing, the slow build of success over the years, it got to the point where I started selling enough that I started to wonder if this could be a possibility,” he recalled.

Once he got that job as a corporate recruiter in Indianapolis, he quickly realized if he wanted to do his art, he would never be in a better position than he was then.

“So I decided to take the risk and do it,” he stated. “So I quit that job in 2011 and I’ve been a full-time painter ever since.”

Vining has painted in Europe and all over the United States. “I am an impressionist. I am a plein air painter, so my specialty is painting oil paintings start to finish on location outside,” he said.

Most of his oil paintings, at least his small ones, take anywhere from one to three hours to paint. He starts and finishes them while standing looking at the scene. “So what that does is, over years and years and years of that type of practice and that type of painting, I am a very fast painter now,” he said, pointing out how much of the Etna Green mural he had completed by shortly after 11 a.m. Monday.

“It might be 8 feet by 32 feet, but I’m treating it as if it was an 8 by 10 panel. Due to the scale of it, I can’t paint it quite as fast as a smaller painting, but I’m painting it just like I would a small painting.”

He’s painted big and small paintings at places like Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler University and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He recognized public art doesn’t always stay, whether that’s 10, 20, 50 or more years down the road.

“Sometimes murals get saved and sometimes they don’t. I’ve done three large-scale murals and two of them don’t even exist anymore. That’s just sort of the nature of working big like this,” Vining said, adding he can’t control what happens to the public art.

Vining first heard about the Etna Green mural through Suzie Light. She came into his gallery in Indianapolis and just mentioned “very top level years ago” they were thinking about putting up a mural in Etna Green. He told Light he had interest in being the artist.

“Being from here, I felt like I almost had a duty to be the one to do it,” Vining said. He worked with Amy A. Roe, Kosciusko County community coordinator, for years to hammer out the mural details.

“It was a very slow process. It took a long time, but it was worth it, for sure. Here we are!” he said.

The imagery for the mural was selected by the Etna Green Town Council. They gave Vining a short list of photos they were interested in potentially including and he narrowed the list down with the help of the town. He wasn’t certain what years the historical photos are from, but estimated them to be somewhere around 1910 to 1920 because of the Model T Fords in one of the pictures.

Vining prepped the panels last week, but didn’t start the mural until Monday. “You can already tell. I’m pretty confident I’m going to be able to get it done. It’s going to look amazing by Saturday,” he stated.

When it was pointed out that one could tell already what everything was going to be, even in the early stages, he continued, “I think that’s the beauty of impressionism. You float between that line of it’s not photo-realism, it’s the idea of that moment, and … it’s that decisonmaking of how much abstraction do you leave? How much do you push it into realism? How much can a brush stroke imply? All of that decisionmaking becomes very addicting, appealing. It’s fun.”

He said there were parts Monday of the mural that he won’t touch again, but he didn’t know yet which parts. “To me it feels more sculptural. It’s like I’m carving this thing, this scene out of a mess of paint,” Vining said.

By the time he’s finished with the mural, the intent is to make it look more like the old photos he was provided.

“We want it sort of this warmish, sepia, black and white. I want it to look antique,” Vining stated. Learn more about Vining at vininggallery.com or visit his art gallery downtown Indianapolis.