LAKE COUNTY >> In 2002 at Ukiah High School, Kit DeCanti was stationed some 30 feet up in the air to paint an athletic scene on the side of the school’s gymnasium. It would be the last large mural she ever painted. As DeCanti was up in the air, she began to lower herself to the ground in order to admire her work and see the details from a new perspective. However, before she reached the bottom of the wall she found herself stopping to touch up a face. As it often goes with her work, she lost herself in the painting and forgot that she wasn’t all that close to the ground. She stepped off the platform and fell to the concrete below. The scare instilled in her a fear of heights that prevented her from continuing to paint large murals. This meant the end of her art shows and the pursuit of other endeavors that kept her closer to the earth.
“The next job, I could not make myself climb the mural,” said DeCanti.
A woman of many talents, DeCanti is a painter, a writer and a loving wife. For many years of her life, DeCanti painted murals for herself, her family and clients around Lake County and the surrounding areas. She started dabbling in painting later in her life, when her husband faced some difficulties and she went in search of a portable artistic outlet.
“I started painting after my husband became disabled and I needed to be able to be in total control of my time and I needed to do something that I could take with me,” DeCanti said. She learned the tricks of painting on canvas and quickly dove into creating murals.
“My first mural I painted for my child, in her nursery,” she said. DeCanti wanted to help foster her daughter’s creativity by creating large, beautiful scenery in the room. “When I think of my first mural, I just wanted to give her a story … to help her imagination,” explained DeCanti. “I used to tell her stories about the animals that were in this mural.”
DeCanti would make up adventures for the owls and the squirrels that adorned the freshly painted wall. Thus began her professional foray into the art form.
“I always dabbled in painting, but I didn’t do it professionally until later in life,” she said.
Her love of the large paintings began during her childhood spent in the colorful hills of San Francisco. “I’ve always been obsessed with murals because I loved them,” DeCanti said. “I grew up in San Francisco driving around and looking at the murals I’ve always been obsessed with murals so I was kinda drawn to them.” Her enjoyment of the art form is all due to a complete absorption while painting, presumably thanks to their large size. “I love getting lost in them. I love being able to expand a flat surface into another dimension,” DeCanti explained. “I do absolutely, totally, loose myself, especially when I’m painting a mural more so than when I’m painting on canvas.”
DeCanti made her living for some time creating murals for client’s weddings, parties and even hot tub backdrops. Her murals were totally portable, allowing people to take them home from their events to keep forever as a beautiful, albeit large, token.
Typical murals took a couple of weeks for DeCanti to complete, starting from conferences with her clients all the way to adding the last touch of paint to the finest detail. “The start is on paper and then you have to project it to make it larger,” she explained. Next she would divide it up and work on the mural section by section. She only painted one or two murals at a time, but with a such a large area to transform, DeCanti was sure to have her hands full.
Her process for the Ukiah High School mural varied from the norm. Some of the school’s art students began work on the mural, however they never managed to complete it and DeCanti was asked to step in. “They paid me to finish it, otherwise they would have just painted over it,” she explained. The entire picture was already laid out and DeCanti just had to grab some paint and work her magic. Besides changing some of the male athletes to female, she didn’t have much to alter.
Even though she doesn’t paint professionally anymore, DeCanti never set down her paintbrush. Today her home is anything but dull. “I have at least a half a dozen murals inside and outside my home and they’re kinda a work in progress,” she said.
The paintings are never static but are constantly changing and evolving. DeCanti adds her grandchildren into various scenes and switches up images for a breath of fresh air. “I had a Mediterranean mural in the dining room and I’m in the process of changing it,” she said.
DeCanti has also become quite the active author in recent years, writing the Cobb Mountain Mystery Series. She is currently penning her fifth novel. “After I became afraid of heights I went out of that business and I started focusing on my writing,” she said.
