Urbanite Theatre plans to make its debut in style and artist Max Ehrman recently came in from San Francisco to help out, painting a mural along the entire west wall of the 2nd Street theater building. Given a roughly 25-by-60-foot space to work with, Ehrman completed the project in three days. 

Ehrman began with a brush, painting the entire space black. It helps the colors “pop”, Ehrman says, and color is his specialty. On his darkened canvas, Ehrman weaves neon spectral wonders – with familiar forms blending into geometric waves and exploding in a visual crescendo across near 150 square feet of concrete. “It’s a rhythm or a flow that creates a color harmony,” said Ehrman. “I’m trying to guide the viewer through the piece using color.” This means using “counterbalances” for certain colors and paying close attention to the angles and eyelines, the artist added.

Urbanite founders Summer Dawn Wallace and Brendan Ragan and the building’s owner gave him a lot of freedom, Ehrman said, and so the resulting product is more representative of his own style than other projects may allow. It’s a style he calls “Organic Funk,” loosely based on natural concepts like the Fibonacci sequence in a shell.

But Ehrman actually discovered his talent for murals late in life, when he was earning his masters in architecture in Gainesville. A wall on campus was open to any and all artists, but none of it interested Ehrman. He’d seen street art but never been really impressed. That is, until the day three Germans came to town and used near the entire wall for a massive composition including photorealism and 3D elements. The architect in Ehrman appreciated the exacting nature of the feat, but there was something else. “It was a really professionally done, beautiful mural,” said Ehrman, “and for some reason it sparked something in me and just blew me away.”

Ehrman “picked up his own can,” as he put it, and gave it a shot. That was about 20 years ago. Today, he receives requests from across the country for his work.

A previous mural from the artist can be seen on the side of the SRQ offices on Pineapple Avenue, a result of Ehrman’s participation in the Sarasota Chalk Festival four years ago.