In Ancient Greece and Rome, those with means sipped their wine and ironed their tunics among in-home hand-painted frescoes. The Herculean labors, Bacchic rites, and mythic battles depicted on villa walls told of the culture’s most deeply held values – while displaying the homeowners’ education and sense of taste to their visitors. Vibrant murals such as these, along with the Egyptian hieroglyphics that came before them and the Middle Ages’ fresco secco that came after, have since influenced the colorful interior design of palaces and homes throughout the world. 

So why now, when you’re browsing Zillow or getting peeks into the homes of the rich and famous, do you find so many austere white and gray boxes with bare walls? Why have we forgone the hand-painted and multicolored in favor of the factory-issued and monotone?

To answer that question, Island artist and muralist Margot Datz looks back to the last wave of color, to the time before the most recent whitewashing. 

“At the end of every century – not to mention millennium – there is a retrospective perspective, an eclecticism that gathers not only from the decorative elements from that century, but from many centuries,” Datz explained.  

Think of the late nineteenth century, when many of Oak Bluffs’s gingerbread cottages were built. Or the 1980s, a time of end-of-millennium opulence.  

The latter was the era “of large Rococo furniture and French chintzes and everything was kind of antiqued gold,” Datz said. At that time, her mural business, which she started with fellow artist Linda Carnegie, was booming. Datz, who was raised in upstate New York and moved to the Vineyard in 1978, could barely keep up with the requests for her whimsical murals. Clients wanted to live among her images of the natural world and scenes of folklore and fairy tales. Some wanted to recreate the beauty of the Island in their own home. Datz danced from house to house, painting sunsets, sailboats, and hydrangeas. 

Then came the 2000s, like the dawning of a harsh new day. “My residential business plummeted,” Datz said. 

A student of art history, Datz saw it coming. “I knew that interior decorative painting was probably on its way out for a good twenty years. Everybody, everybody was painting their interiors gray. It was just gray slabs, straight lines, black-and-white photography, not even paintings.”

Datz took the changes in stride, as she always has. Before she was a painter, Datz was a sculptor. During that phase, she made countless human figures. Then, after having a baby, things changed. 

“As soon as I had the baby, I didn’t want to make any more sculptures,” she said. “I’d never realized that making these hundreds of figures was really about having one real baby. I mean, Jung would have had some fun with that one.”

So she pivoted to murals, which she called the favorite painting format of former sculptors who don’t want to be boxed in by a frame. Like a sculpture, a mural is of the world. “A painting is a pond. A mural is a river,” Datz said. “It’s not a mural until you have to turn your head.”

To get her name out there, she painted the now-famous murals – couples dancing at sunset, a farmer looking out over the land – at the former Hot Tin Roof for what essentially amounted to the cost of materials. From then on, it was mural-painting gangbusters.

“It was so kind of Forrest Gump-y, in that we just happened to be in the right place at the right time,” she said.

Since a mural is created to be a semi-permanent part of a home, the process of creating one depends on who would be living beside it. Datz would often meet with a client and see the wall in question, then sketch out a simple plan on paper. Some clients would come with a specific idea and some, her favorites, would give her free rein to imagine what should be depicted on the wall. Once the content and composition was settled on, Datz would often camp out and paint around the clock.

Although the demand for this kind of home décor has since waned, the demand for public art has not. Datz painted the trompe l’oeil interior of the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, scenes at both Steamship Authority terminals, an aquatic scene at the Edgartown Public Library, and many others. 

Whether the in-home murals will come back in style or not, no one can say for sure. But, in our current age of white cube homes, artificial intelligence, and mass production, Datz said that we can still embrace the handmade. Her own home is a collection of paintings, sculptures, and art of all kinds. Why is it important to live among the things that people create?

“I once went to an ashram,” Datz said by way of response. “They had the chair that this guru had sat in, and it was roped off and sacred. But they also had his flip-flops. And I said, ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘Because grace pours down into the guru and into the chair that the guru sat in and into his flip-flops.’”

They believe in something called mana, Datz explained. Mana “is like juice. It’s like beautiful grace juice. And I began to think about how antiques have mana; children’s toys that they play with a lot have mana; something handmade has mana. I really think that handmade things hold a kind of energy that is comforting and enduring and remarkable.”