Work on one of Texas’ largest murals is underway in Longview

Published 10:55 pm Monday, August 4, 2025

What started as a daydream behind the handlebars of a moped is now becoming a full-blown landmark-in-the-making and possibly the largest mural in East Texas.

“For three years, I’ve dreamed about painting this wall,” artist Laren Slaton, owner of Mustard Seed Murals, said about the mural on the Longview Mall property.

That dream found its first brushstroke when she pitched the idea to the mall’s management. They liked the vision but couldn’t commit funds for such a large-scale endeavor.

Slaton didn’t back down.

“I offered to do it for free if they would cover the equipment and paint,” she said. That deal sealed a trial run – a modest 45-foot section of the 1,400-foot-long retaining wall in the mall’s east parking lot..

The initial stretch impressed the mall management — and they gave the thumbs-up to go bigger. Much bigger.

But with size came a new challenge: how to fund it. Slaton got creative, launching a sponsorship program in which businesses could buy space on the mural for $20 per square foot, complete with their logos artistically incorporated into the design.

“It shows people that, you know, they’re a small business, but they still care about their community and how it looks by sponsoring this,” Slaton said.

Painting the massive, sloped wall has been physically demanding and occasionally risky.

“It’s not easy to paint,” a paint-speckled Slaton said Monday while taking a break. “One day the ladder I was using went this way and I ended up sliding bare-bellied down that wall. It had been painted, so it didn’t hurt too bad, but yeah, that’s the most difficult part about it.”

Slaton’s mural is on track to surpass East Texas’ current largest mural, the 10,000-square-foot “Genesis” in Beaumont by artist Drew Merritt. Slaton estimates her work will exceed that by at least 400 square feet but said it is difficult for her to know exactly how many square feet the wall is because of its irregular shape with its height varying from 10 to 20 feet.

Joining Slaton are fellow artists Toby Wolfe and Jodi Hicks, mural and window-painting veterans who saw her call for collaborators on Facebook and jumped in with paintbrushes blazing.

“Everybody’s loved it,” Slaton said. “Everybody that comes by, and there’s hundreds of cars that come through here every day, but they’ve all loved it.”