Whether it’s a massive outdoor mural visible from the freeway or a custom interior piece for a tech headquarters, every project is built with the same discipline: aerosol only, zero stencils, maximum presence.
The medium is where the practice comes from. Shae Petersen started as a graffiti artist, very young, with the aerosol foundation dating to 1996 in Salt Lake City. Years of professional design work followed, as Creative Director for major tech companies, and he picked spray paint back up in 2007. The work since has combined the graffiti aesthetic with graphic design principles, which is the short answer to why a Utah graffiti artist and a photo-realist muralist turn out to be the same person.
That history is why the graffiti work and the mural work are not separate services. A wall painted freehand in aerosol carries the line quality and color blending that come from writing, and the realism comes from the design years. There are no stencils and no projections on any project, at any size, which is the part most people ask about first.
Whether the search was for a Utah mural artist, a muralist or a mural painter, the answer on this site is the same person: Shae designs the wall, then paints it, with no crew and no stencils.
The work is spread across the Wasatch Front rather than concentrated in one place. Atlas, painted for SALT Development in 2018, is one of the largest murals in Utah. Godlike went up in Salt Lake City in 2015 for Stone Unlimited, and portraits of Post Malone and Rudy Gobert followed in the same city in 2019 and 2025. Lagoon commissioned a piece in Farmington in 2020. Billy Blanco’s has one in Park City from 2013, Fear and Loathing is in Sandy, a Steve McQueen portrait is in Draper, and Bountiful holds two: vintage warplanes inside a private aircraft hangar, and a sea turtle along a tennis court wall.
The palette is the signature. Realist drawing gets built out of colors that are not realist at all: red against turquoise on Atlas, blue against violet on Godlike, saturated rather than muted, chosen to hold up in Utah daylight on a wall people pass at speed. It is the part clients describe back after the fact, and the reason a vibrant mural and a photo-realistic one turn out not to be a choice.
Commercial clients have included SALT Development, PEG Companies, Lagoon, Billy Blanco’s and HGTV, alongside the Utah Jazz, BYU, Traeger, Utah Motorsports Campus, Mountain America Credit Union and This Is The Place Heritage Park. Those jobs tend to start the same way: a wall nobody looks at, a deadline, and a building that needs to be recognizable from the road.
Utah is the home base, not the boundary. Ignite was painted for Dan Bilzerian in Las Vegas in 2022 and Polar for The Linq in 2015, with more recent private commissions in Manhattan and Orange County. Closer to home the coverage runs from Provo and Lehi north through Highland and Alpine, and south to St. George, where exterior work has to survive desert sun rather than a Salt Lake winter.