Across from Cold Beer Co. in Deep Ellum sits a solid orange building surrounded by bright blue concrete.
Social media users have wondered for weeks what's going on with the seemingly abandoned building.
Scott Rohrman is the man behind the mural. "Orange House in a Blue Field" is part of the second installment of 42 Murals, an art project that began in 2015.
On a wall next to the building is a mural by Jorge Gutiérrez, director of the movie The Book of Life, Rohrman says.
"This brick building is in a crappy-looking parking lot," Rohrman says. "It's right next to this really good-looking mural, so [we thought], 'Why don't we put some color there?' and we did."
In five days, Rohrman and some college students painted the entire building Sherwin Williams' Osage Orange and the surrounding concrete blue.
While Rohrman has received positive feedback on the color of the building, he says it's up to interpretation.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." – "Orange House in a Blue Field" artist Scott Rohrman
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"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," he says. "So I don't know if people think it looks good or not, but art is just something to get people talking and thinking, and we thought that's what this will do."
This year, portraits are the overall theme of 42 Murals, a project that lets local artists showcase their talent on the facades of Deep Ellum buildings.
As Rohrman was deciding what he should do for 42 Murals, he drove around Deep Ellum and looked at the buildings. When he found the building across from CBC, he says, it was telling him to be orange, even if that doesn't exactly fit in with the portrait theme.
"As I just sat and looked at [it], it just felt like it kind of needed to be orange in a blue field, so we did it," he says. "I was just sitting there, going, 'What should we do with this? What if we do a mural on four walls? What if we just make the whole thing one big mural?' I think simple is better than complicated on this. If it was in a blue field, it would probably set itself off a little more. It just kind of came into being."
