ART

How far would you go for your art?

Or perhaps the question is really ’how high?’

In that case, the answer for Tao LaBossiere is 60 feet.

Maybe even higher. But for now, LaBossiere is focused on the 60-foot mural he intends to paint this coming spring on the outer wall of a building in downtown Hartford.

An award-winning muralist, sculptor, and illustrator, Tao is a Hartford-based artist and founder of Art of Tao LaBossiere LLC. Artistically speaking, he does it all — transforming architecture through large-scale murals, creating,and restoring sculptures, designing custom illustrations, and hand-crafting mixed media artwork.

His 25 years as a professional artist leave in its wake a host of satisfied clients, including cities and towns, public libraries, schools, restaurants, and private art patrons throughout the tri-state area.

“Basically, we provide commercial businesses, like restaurants and organizations, with a fine art expression of their brand,” says Tao’s wife Amy, a multi-disciplinary artist in her own right, who boasts more than two decades of experience in marketing public relations and creative communication. She also serves as business manager of the couple’s company.

“The art that we're creating is branding art for a new business or organization.,” explains Tao. “They each have their own vision of what their institution is — what their mission statement is — and it's our job to interpret that visually, so that it aligns with the brand.”

But back to murals.

“I have the most creative freedom painting murals, even if they are designed by committee or directed by an organization,” says Tao. “The BBQ Bears Smokehouse mural, for example, was one of the first large murals that arose in Hartford in 2015. It's beautiful. It’s the entrance to the city. It's iconic, and we had a fantastic client to work with.”

In that case, Tao took what the client wished for the building — which was to incorporate the smokers into the design — and used the creative flexibility to architecturally transform the building’s facade.

Huh?

“What that means is I architecturally transformed the

building through painting,” explains Tao. “For Smokehouse BBQ, I took the cinderblock wall and painted it to look like reclaimed barnboard — like the wall surface of an old barn — and I incorporated into it a stone chimney and that incorporated the smokers that they had actually built into the building. And so, that’s how I incorporated the building elements into the mural so that the smokers were coming out of the chimney. Then I created trompe-loeil from the tin roof, so it looked like a smokestack, and I painted a bear on the surface of the painted barn board. So, it looked like some other artists had painted a bear to support the barbecue theme of the restaurant.

“So ultimately, architectural transformations mean I was fooling the eye and hopefully making the viewer believe for a few moments that they're looking at a completely different kind of building.”

Today, he’s working on a massive project for 224 Ecospace, a premier arts, health, and wellness social enterprise in Hartford.

“It's a giant honeycomb,” says Amy, “and the mural represents their hive of activity — they actually have a pollinator garden out back. The bees represent a busy community. The hive is like the heart of the community. The flowers represent growth. With this particular one, we collaborated with our with our client, Dr. Reverend Dr. Stanley. The three of us came up with this concept and sort of developed it together and then Tao started getting the visual in his mind of what this was going to look like and started creating. It's just amazing to do that. We really enjoy that creative process when we work with clients.

“I love the fact that we get a client, a small business owner, and they really don't know what direction they want to go in to create a brand image. So, we start out from a very creative perspective and then we figure out how that supports their business, and we incorporate things like social media marketing. A lot of our murals are inherently interactive for people. It's no longer just a beautiful, pretty picture on the wall. It's a marketing tool that lasts the life of the business and that's and this is my background.”

For Tao, a mural is not just a mural.

“I love the creative challenge of taking the business brand and leading it through a visual language of art,” he says. “So hopefully when you look at the murals that we create for businesses the creativity, the visual, is the fun part that draws you in, and then then you automatically relate to the business, and it becomes the business identity. It goes beyond just having a sign that says such and such. And so, I like the creative challenge of how you take a business and turn it into a visual image that supports the business on many different levels. It's not just a random mural. It serves to market the business and that could work externally on exterior or interior.” The painting of the downtown Hartford mural in 2022 is reflective of “a shift in the company’s primary focus that will allow Tao to find more of his pure artistic voice,” says Amy.

“He's going to be painting his own personal vision, without input or influence from a business and organization. It's just his vision on the wall,” she notes.

That’s a first for Tao, whose career as a professional artist spans 25 years.

“This will be my first my first large scale mural painting that is simply what I want to create – what I have a passion for as an artist,” notes Tao. “I've created dozens of designs for the outer walls of buildings throughout the city of Hartford, which I've submitted to the city's graphic arts council since 2000. But there's really no existing mural programming in place. There's no system that connects artists with buildings and connects the arts with funders. There's nothing like that. It's changing now. Things are starting in that direction, finally. So that's good.”

The mural is funded by a generous grant from the Free Center's Independent Artists Fund, made possible by Artists of Color Unite, advisors to the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

“It's a unique grant program that has provided funding opportunities to those usually left out of the money pool,” says Amy. “It's a wonderful fund that gives artists the ability to really create from their heart and soul and really do their calling as artists.”

The grant will provide Tao, who is of Chinese heritage, with half the monies needed to complete his project.

“The amount of the money that's been awarded is wonderful,” say Tao. “We're very grateful and I will make this happen, whether I'm paid or not. But it would really be nice to raise some money that would allow me to be actually paid a living wage for the contribution I'm going to be making to the city of Hartford. I would love to be paid as a working artist!”

Tao defines his mission as an artist as the celebration of community through creativity. That mission is reflected in his work as a commercial artist as well as his extensive volunteer efforts to improve his community and support local artists.

His dedication to helping other artists is what led him to become the longtime director of the Hartford ArtSpace Gallery which gives artists, aspiring and otherwise, space to exhibit their art. In fact, the LaBossieres where the first residents of the Hartford ArtSpace building, where they continue to live to this day.

And then, of course, there is the 2021 WeHa Bear Fair.

Tao worked on the playful exhibition of painted fiberglass bears now on display in the town of West Hartford as both an artist and technical consultant.

And how he came to do that has a lot to do with cows.

“[Bear Fair director] Leslie [Iarusso] contacted us because of our breadth and depth of experience with the fiberglass cows that are known as Cow Parade,” explains Amy. “Tao has been working on the Cow Parade for decades. He was a regular freelance artist working directly with them to restore and custom sculpt the fiberglass cows. He's also done corporate commissions, sculpting fiberglass cows.”

Tao not only participated as one of the artists — he painted the whimsical Bluebeary Bush — he also served as a consultant for the artists, leading a Zoom call to answer their technical questions, helping them to determine what materials to use, and providing them with his list of pitfalls and best practices.

Recently, the bears were moved from their outdoor location at Blue Back Square to indoors at Westfarms Mall. Once again, Tao was enlisted to restore several of the bears that were damaged either by the elements or overzealous visitors — or by artists who used the wrong materials.

Ideally, “the restoration should have been done indoors -- so it required some creative problem solving as we went through this process,” explains Tao. “But art is creative problem solving.”

“I loved painting my Bluebeary Bush bear just because it was fun,” says Tao. “I enjoy painting and inserting little Easter egg surprises for people to discover -- like the Blueberry cub climbing up the bear’s back leg -- so I really enjoy the creative process. Of course, that's why I'm an artist.”

“But I also very much am thrilled every time I see an event come together with artists of all sorts of different abilities, caliber, creativity, all celebrating. For me, art is a celebration of community through creativity. That's also why we've volunteered to run Hartford Artspace gallery here for the past 22 years.”

“One of the differentiators for Tao is that he's been at this a really long time. And that's where some of this consulting has come into play,” says Amy. “He knows he has his own systems of best practices that enable him to create something with integrity and longevity. And his seasoned ability to get things done well with exquisite attention to detail is a real differentiator.”

Before spring comes winter. And so, while Tao has the creation of the Hartford building mural on his calendar for the spring, he’s got another project in the hopper that will keep his creative juices flowing this fall.

“Two years ago, I made a New Year's resolution to create a “punny” illustration a day and I did, for 186 days in a row. So, I'm going to pick the best of those and create a book and then simultaneously have an art show. My first solo show — I've never had a solo show here at the gallery! I’ll will look for some grant funding for that as well, because there's a lot of expense to creating the book.” n