Culpeper artist Layton Scarbrough has been busy this past week, painting a new mural on the back side of the Dorothy Hart Community Center on Canal Street in Fredericksburg.
The artist was hired by the Fredericksburg Arts Commission who selected Scarbrough after a call for muralists over the winter. Scarbrough was tasked with creating a design that would portray the many community activities going on at Dorothy Hart.
“We kind of went back and forth with a few different designs,” Scarbrough said. “We landed on one that celebrates the wide range of programming that the center has.”
The mural, named Shared Spaces Shared Stories, contains scenes of a preschool art class, an homage to wildlife exploration on area walking trails, seniors playing board games and a scene of kids playing basketball.
The project is the culmination of several years of work by the arts commission, which established a mural subcommittee in 2024 to create new murals funded by the city. The subcommittee included Kelley Drake, D.D. Lecky, Gabe Ponds, Javonne Kirby, Amanda Richards, Michael Robertson, Tanya Green, Simon Watts, MC Morris and Hunter Mitchell, who all have ties to the Fredericksburg arts community.
A set of guidelines had to be written and the existing public art policy had to be updated to include the new mural requirements and rules, plus addressing legal issues regarding property rights and maintenance of the works. Once the new public art policy was finalized, the committee selected the Dorothy Hart Community Center as the pilot site for the first city-funded mural.
“There was a lot of back and forth on trying to find different spaces to do this and there were talks about how the city would work with publicly owned property or private owned property,” said FAC chairman Kelley Drake. “When it came down to it, we decided it would be best to work with publicly owned property. The primary goal is to locate these murals in gateway areas to attract people into the city.”
The community center has been a hub of activity in Fredericksburg for decades, dating back to its origin as a USO building in 1942. It is now home to the city’s parks, recreation and events department and used for a multitude of activities.
“Although the Dorothy Hart Center is not a gateway spot, it is a heavily trafficked street and so much of our community goes there for different things. Every time we have an election many people go in to vote. There are children’s events in the summer and all the arts programs; it just seemed like a good place to get that visibility and be strongly attached to a historic building in the city,” Drake said.
After the site was chosen, regional artists were asked to submit applications. Twenty-five artists were considered and the subcommittee narrowed it down to the top three. Those three artists met with the jurors for an interview and then Scarbrough was chosen.
“From their artwork and their interviews there was a discussion and that’s when Layton was picked. Everything was so close,” Drake said. “The artists were all so amazing. It was a really hard decision to make for everybody.”
Scarbrough has painted many different murals on a variety of locations and surfaces including downtown Culpepper, Black Bear Manor in Sperryville, and a series of murals at Walmart locations around the country. The mural at the Dorothy Hart center was painted on a series of panels attached to the side of the building. The panels provide an ideal surface to paint on and will allow the work to be moved at a later date.
“This is the first time I’ll have done panel work,” Scarborough said. “I’ve painted on probably every surface imaginable. I’ve had the opportunity to paint on century old barns and sidewalks and parking lots and brick and all sorts of things. When they said this would be on boards I said, ‘Awesome I can’t wait to do it. I haven’t done that one before.’”
The mural is 35 feet long and four feet high — a size that requires quite a bit of planning and practice.
“A lot of my art friends say, ‘I don’t know how you paint so big’,” said Scarbrough. “It’s the same as painting on a canvas just a little bigger.”
Scarbrough said he uses a lot of different methods when it comes to sketching out the design. “One I primarily use is called the doodle grid method. You paint a whole bunch of random shapes and letters all over the wall, you take a picture of it and I put it on my iPad then overlay my photo or sketching reference. Then I can go, if I had the alphabet, the nose goes over the A and the B and I can match it up that way.”
He said he always starts with the eyes. “Because the one thing about doing public work is everyone’s going to see the ugly stage of your work. So if I can start with the eyes and make it look good from the get-go then people will know that what I’m doing is going to look okay at the end.”
