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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Shawn Fitzwater Muralist
Shawn Fitzwater, a muralist and owner of Fitz Hand Painted Signs, stands in front of one of his signs located in West Homewood.
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Photo by Sam Chandler.
The Color TV sign painted on the brick wall of Edgewood Frame Shop at 1003 Oxmoor Road.
When Shawn Fitzwater’s barber learned that he was an artist, she told him about the local mural she had always wanted to see restored.
It was the Color TV sign painted on the brick wall of Edgewood Frame Shop, at 1003 Oxmoor Road. Its letters had faded so much they were nearly illegible, earning an eerie designation: ghost mural.
“I don’t know who really coined that term,” Fitzwater said, “but it’s just an old advertising sign that’s fading away, like a ghost of the past.”
Fitzwater recently injected the mural, originally created in 1966, with new life. He restored it over the course of a week in mid-November, applying a fresh coat of paint that has made the formerly inconspicuous image now impossible to miss.
It has a vintage appearance, but with fresh pop.
“There are little things you can do to kind of make it look distressed or bring it back 100%, and I didn’t really want to bring it back 100%,” said Fitzwater, sitting on a bench beside his handiwork. “I kind of wanted to keep the charm of it — old, you know — so I kind of tried to go with a distressed look on it.”
The project was born from ambition.
After Fitzwater finished working on a sign at another Edgewood establishment, Sam’s Deli and Grill, he decided to place his business card on the doors of nearby storefronts. It was 11 p.m., long after the commercial strip had shut down for the night.
Fitzwater does a lot of his work under the veil of darkness. That’s because he stays home during the day to watch his 1-year-old while his wife, an accountant, is at the office.
Fitzwater fielded a call from John Creel of Seguro Insurance, which is in the same building as Edgewood Frame Shop, shortly after he distributed his business cards. Creel expressed interest in having the Color TV mural restored. He and Sam Sicola, an owner of neighboring Trilogy Leather, agreed to finance the face-lift.
“They kind of teamed up with me and they said, ‘Hey, we’ll help fund this thing,’” Fitzwater recalled. “We just kind of worked together on it, and I started doing a bunch of research.”
Fitzwater posted on Facebook about his endeavor and asked if anyone had old photos of the sign he could reference. He also consulted with Charles Buchanan, an advertising expert, artist and writer who published the book “Fading Ads of Birmingham.”
To restore the mural, Fitzwater used an exterior acrylic latex paint from Sherwin Williams. He did most of his work while standing on scaffolding and painted into the wee hours of the morning.
“It’s kind of funny, I got to know the Homewood PD,” Fitzwater said. “They’ll drive by doing the rounds and they’ll honk or something. They’re kind of getting used to seeing me. Like, ‘Oh, he’s not a graffiti guy. That’s just the sign-painter guy.’”
He hasn’t always been.
Fitzwater, a Homewood High graduate, spent 20 years as a land surveyor before scratching his entrepreneurial itch in 2017. As the owner of Spokesman Cycle Ads LLC, he hitched an advertisement carrier to the back of his bicycle and towed it around town, selling space to local businesses.
He billed it as a unique take on mobile advertising.
But Fitzwater let that venture fizzle out in 2018 once painting became a viable full-time job. He’s always had artistic talent, inclined as a boy to draw with pencil and paper, and decided to pursue it.
He picked up a paintbrush for the first time a couple of years ago when he created a mural in his kids’ bedroom. Fitzwater depicted a cartoon character, Steven Universe from the Cartoon Network, and posted a video to Facebook displaying his progress.
It caught the eye of Mark Driskill, owner of Ash in West Homewood, who then asked Fitzwater to paint a sign for his new restaurant.
“That was the first one I ever painted,” Fitzwater said, “so after I painted that it kind of got the attention of another business owner, and they wanted a sign, and then another, another, another.”
Fitzwater officially launched Fitz Hand Painted Signs about a year and a half ago. He has done work around Homewood, including for the Ambiance clothing store on 18th Street South and now-closed Lucky Cat Rolled Creams. He also painted a community mural at Big Color print shop on Oxmoor Road in West Homewood. As of early December, that was the only public mural he had self-designed.
“But I’ve got more in the works coming up,” he said, “You’re going to see some stuff in the next couple months.”
To learn more about Fitzwater and follow his work, search Fitz Hand Painted Signs on Facebook or @fitzsigns on Instagram. He can be reached by email at fitzart2018@gmail.com.
