Birth of a Song

Jamie Lester brings more than just music to Morgantown.

If you’ve been to Sheetz downtown in the past few weeks, you probably noticed a colorful new addition to the Andrew White Guitars building at 198 Foundry Street. 

Morgantown artist and musician Jamie Lester and his wife, Nadia, developed the idea for their mural Birth of a Song over the past year and spent a whopping 12 days painting it on the side of White’s popular luthier shop. As longtime friends, Lester and White found special excitement in the large-scale project. 

Here are a few things that you may not have known about the mural:
 

• The inspiration comes from a theme Lester has been working with for decades, blending elements of surrealism with prior ideas. “I had been wanting to develop a large-scale mural with birds flying out of the child’s head and across the building, but when designing it, I went in a slightly different direction and made a piece about creativity and, specifically, musical creativity,” he says.
  
• In his mind, when we create, an idea or impulse prompts us to act in a creative way. “We either listen to that impulse or deny it, but I think if we listen and follow through to the completion of that artwork and give it over to the community, then the creative energy comes back.” 

• Lester intended for the child to be unidentifiable as male or female. He chose the ethnicity of the child based on what he felt was an underrepresented group in West Virginia. 

Catch Lester this weekend at Main Street Morgantown’s July Arts Walk downtown. He will be playing music at Andrew White Guitars from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and will have stickers, signed prints, and artifacts from the mural-making process there for sale as well. 

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