She really does do windows.

And local artist Tamara Haase is responsible for a number of the murals seen on shop windows on or near Covington’s Downtown Square.

Though she had experience painting indoor and outdoor murals, before Halloween this fall, she had never painted a window in her life. About that time, someone asked if she painted window murals for Christmas.

She didn’t.

But, then, someone else asked, and then someone else. “I said, ‘hmmm, there’s a need here.’”

So she started doing research on the Internet, learning how to paint windows. She watched a series of You Tube videos.

Other sites offered business advice.

“I started practicing on my windows [at home],” she said. “It was painting, but on a different surface with paints that didn’t wash away.”

The practice murals on her windows, she said, scrolled across the back of her house. In addition to scenes, she practiced script, but the windows were too small to write much more than a letter or two. “My neighbors probably thought I was crazy.”

The windows were eventually scraped clean and Haase put together a flyer, which she started handing out to businesses around the Square.

“Bradley’s was the first to take a chance on me,” Haase said. Owner Bradley Stewart “sat down and wrote me a check on the spot.”

Not only did she paint the restaurant’s window in Covington, but she painted the restaurant’s window in Conyers.

“Most people have an idea of what they want,” she said.”Bradley’s wanted pigs with antlers pulling Santa’s sleigh. Santa isn’t in the mural.”

Andrea Smith, owner of Square Perk, wanted Haase to incorporate images referencing some of the events that would be held on the Square over the Christmas season, including figures of the Grinch and Olaf.

Haase also painted the backdrop for Grinch when the Dr. Seuss character made his appearance on the Square Friday night.

Window art is part of small town charm

Over a three week period, Haase painted 15 window murals. In addition to the window murals at Bradley’s , Computer Troubleshooters and Square Perk, shops boasting Haase’s work included, Bread and Butter Bakery, Massey Insurance and Ribbity Ribbitz in Covington; Merle Normans in Covington and Conyers; Quck Loans in Conyers; and Monticello Drugs.

“I was genuinely surprised,” she said. “It seems to be something a lot of the businesses on squares wanted,” she said. “I think it’s because people are walking [small town] squares and there’s more foot traffic.”

Having owned a frame shop just off the Square in the late 1990s, Haase said that Covington “is really hopping from what it was like when I had the frame shop.”

“It’s fun to do the murals. It’s big and quick and you get to see the finished work,” she said, adding that the hardest part was starting and finishing a work in one day.

Now that the holiday season work is slowing down, Haase said she will turn her attention back to portraits and murals, though she’s ready to paint window murals, again, too. Smith of Square Perk has expressed interest in having a set of Valentine’s Day murals.

She can also do window murals for other holidays, sales and seasons. “Anything they want, I will do,” she said. “Now that I have a little portfolio that will help a lot.”

Starting at a young age

Haase said she has always loved drawing and started early in elementary school in Stone Mountain. With four other students, she studied with a serious art teacher.

“She taught us technique and line drawing, things that weren’t fun or cute,” Haase said. “The lessons developed my eye.”

Of the five children in the afterschool class, four went on to art school, Haase said.

Haase started college at the Atlanta College of Art, now Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta Campus, in 1988-89.

“Having a lot of artists together without outside influence was a little crazy,” she said. “It wasn’t the healthiest of life style.”

Deciding she needed a change, she enrolled at the University of Georgia (UGA) and planned on majoring in business. UGA, she discovered, was too large.

“It was like being Goldilocks,” she said. “This one is too crazy, this one is too big. I ended up at West Georgia, which was just right. My parents were happy because the tuition dropped every time I changed schools.”

Graduating in 1992, she took off for Scotland, a gift from her parents. There, she did volunteer work in preservation, rebuilding stone walls at historic sites for the Scottish Conservation Project, allied with the British National Trust.

Throughout the summer, she traveled to Glasgow, through the Highlands and to the Orkney Islands.

“I just wanted to go stay in Scotland,” she said, adding that she had Scottish ancestry. “They were different from the English. They embraced Americans and the Rebel spirit.”

In Scotland, she met people from all over the world.

Fine arts wasn’t a practical degree

Returning to the United States, she began to realize that a degree in fine arts was not very practical. “It’s hard to make a living with art.”

Instead, she has worked cleaning house, in the construction field and waiting tables, “a lot of different jobs that had nothing to do with art. I advise young people [interested in art] to really think of how they’re going to support themselves.”

Over the next 10 years, she didn’t do much with art. She did marry Tim Haase, an over-the-road truck driver in 2000, whom she had met while living in Washington State. “I came back to Georgia, to Newton County and lived on Jackson Lake in a cabin in the mid-1990s. Tim followed shortly afterwards.”

Now 45, Haase has two children, 12, and Ben, 7. And she has turned her attention back to art.

“The work I’ve done this past year was the result of prayer. I said, ‘All right, God, you gave me the skills. What do you want me to do with them?”

All of a sudden people started popping up. That mural wasn’t even on my radar.

In late July, Haase finished a 50-by-15-foot mural celebrating the events, places and people that made the town of Mansfield special. Dedicated in early August, the mural is painted on the side of the former Air Power building, a two story, 100 year-old brick building across from Hays Tractor on Highway 11. The building, originally meant to be a hotel, was set to open when the boll weevil infestation brought the cotton industry crashing down. The hotel never opened. It was used as a hotel for scenes in “My Cousin Vinny.”

Haase said she had been painting interior murals when a friend asked her to speak at her garden club. “I had made little canvas drawings of flowers for everyone to paint and have fun.

“One of the members of the club, Kathryn Honey, asked if I offered private art lessons,” she said. Later Honey told her Mansfield needed a mural.

“I thought it was awesome,” she said. Honey “told me her vision – Mansfield, past and present.”

So, Haase started working on her first outdoor mural.

“People seemed to enjoy it, though there are things I’d do differently now,” Haase admitted. Since then, she’s been putting her fine arts degree to work, painting portraits of pets and people, as well as continuing with murals.

Drawn to the Atelier Movement

She said her style is realism, which, during her art school days, wasn’t considered “real” art. However, a new trend in art, the Atelier Movement, is bringing back an appreciation for classical realism and portraiture.

“I would love to pursue the movement more, like to achieve technical mastery,” she said. “My goal is to be a well-know, highly proficient portraitist, the kind that paints presidential portraits. It’s capturing a person’s character and conveying who they are in paint ... capturing that moment that captures the essence of that person.”

To see more of Haase’s work, visit http://www.tamarahaase.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/artisttamarahaase/.
Read “For Mansfield, home is where the art is,” and more about the Mansfield mural at http://www.covnews.com/archives/60218/