With its homestyle cuisine, friendly service, and bright yellow paint job, the mansion-like Miller’s Seawall Grill has been a Galveston institution for almost 50 years. Earlier this month, it added yet another asset: one of the island’s most striking murals, courtesy of artist Justin Lopez.
Lopez had already done one for the restaurant’s upstairs bar/gazebo area a few months back. This time owner Sherry Smith asked him to do something outside, on a back wall facing Bernardo de Galvez Avenue. She wanted a marine-life theme with a shark and some colorful fish, but otherwise left the details up to him.
“We do a lot of sea turtles, dolphins, and stuff like that around here,” Lopez said, referring to other local artists, “so I said, ‘What do we not have? A big oyster with a pearl on it.’”
It took Lopez five days to complete the Miller’s mural; smaller jobs usually take two or three. He does a lot of work for the island’s Airbnb owners, who often need a job done before their next booking. In a somewhat different vein, he also picked up a live-painting gig at last weekend’s Third Eyeland Party.
Whatever the job, on or off-island, there are always curious bystanders while he’s working, Lopez said. He enjoys talking to them, finding it a great networking opportunity.
“Anytime I do public art like that, somewhere out where people are just walking by, I get a lot of that,” he said. “Passersby just want to stop and talk about what goes into it and what I’m doing, and I just kind of let ’em know.
“There’s always a lot of that, and I always enjoy it,” he continued. “I hand out business cards to let people know what I’m doing.”
Six or seven years of steady work has helped Lopez develop a keen sense of color theory. (The ones in the Miller’s mural certainly pop.) He stays booked about two months out, he says, and does a lot of work on private homes. However, his portfolio also includes local businesses such as the Market Station pool hall, Tucker Masonic Lodge, Seawall Marriott Hotel, and Galveston Bagel Company. Considering the heavy tourist presence on the island, he takes care to ensure his pieces are easily taggable on Instagram.
Lopez is a proud BOI, born on the island, and graduated from Galveston’s Ball High School in 2006. He started making art as a kid, then stopped for several years until 2017, when an old friend he ran into at the grocery store invited to participate in The Kindness Project, a collaborative initiative in which the city asked local artists to help spruce up the long-abandoned McCrory’s building downtown.
After that, “slowly, people started reaching out to me to do the projects they wanted, so I started charging,” Lopez said. “Now I make a living doing that.”
For more of Lopez’s art, visit his Facebook page, where he gets a lot of his best leads, he said.
