SRILART
Standing on a snow-covered Manhattan rooftop beside a ladder, brick towers rising on every side

exterior · 2026

Manhattan Portrait

Location
Manhattan, New York
Services
Mural · Design
Year
2026

The challenge

A four-story portrait on a Manhattan side wall, painted in March 2026. The wall is only reachable from a suspended scaffold rigged off the roof, which means the whole face is worked at arm's length and can never be seen at full size from where it is being painted. It snowed.

Four stories of freehand aerosol on the side of a Manhattan building, painted in March 2026.

The practical problem with a wall this tall is that you cannot stand back from it. Everything is painted at arm’s length from a scaffold suspended off the roof, so proportion has to be held in your head and checked from the street, one trip down at a time. The same freehand method as every other wall on this site: no stencils, no projection.

Then there was the weather. In Shae’s own words: “The snow storm slowed me down, but didn’t stop me.”

Two workers on a suspended scaffold rigged against a bare four-story side wall, seen from the street
The wall before anything went on it, rigged from the roof
Looking straight down the face of the wall from the roofline, snow on the setbacks and cars below
Looking down the wall from the rig
Finished portrait of a blonde woman filling a four-story brick side wall above a Manhattan street
Finished, four stories above the street

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