Tyrone Beall’s Artwork Adorns Both a Museum and a Liquor Store

“I remember my dad getting me my first set of chalk pastels for Christmas many years ago, and he was like, ‘You should get back into creating,'” recalls Denver artist Tyrone Beall, creator of BeAll Envision & Design, LLC. He chuckles at the mess his 22-year-old self enthusiastically created with the pastels, but 27 years later, the soft pigmented sticks remain Beall’s favorite medium.

His artistic endeavors started when he was a child, the temptation of creative freedom calling to him from an early age. He remembers taking trips to see his family in the mountains, carting an overly large wooden art-supply briefcase and letting hours slip by as he sprawled around the house, sketching spaceship scenes with his cousin.

His relationship with art fluctuated throughout his teenage years, but it was that gift of chalk pastels – and the knowledge that his family supported him – that rekindled his passion for art in a big way. Five years later, attracted to the security and creativity that graphic design promised, Beall went on to attend Platt College’s graphic design program.

And now he makes a living as an artist. For a decade, Beall was an integral part of the graphic design, print production and graphic installation team at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. He loved having access to items in the archive, drawing inspiration from pieces of history that called to him, such as a tupilak (a vessel meant to hold spirits) hand-carved by an Indigenous tribe in Greenland. He ended up creating an illustration of the piece.

Beall’s passion for his artwork shines through his detailed descriptions of how it feels to manipulate chalk pastels, blending lines with his fingers and accidentally smudging pigment along the side of his arms. “You can put down a solid black and then do a bright yellow or green or whatever on top, and it stays striking,” Beall explains. “But the main thing is blending and being hands-on, getting my fingers on it.” 

His personal work is surreal and contemporary, mostly comprising pieces created with pencil and, of course, chalk pastels. Beall creates in a free-flowing style, often beginning with a single eye before forming a face and backdrop around it. “That’s when the magic happens,” he says. “I can start seeing things within the painting that I’m not necessarily creating, but then it just kind of comes and appears there.”

Ultimately, it was Beall’s zeal for his own work that pushed him to leave the museum in December 2022. He completed his makeshift backyard art studio, a lean-to shed with windows and walls painted a bright, inspirational blue, saying that he longed “to get back to my own expression, my own work outside of having a creative field, a creative job.”

So he got to work, creating BeAll Envision & Design, LLC, his own freelance graphic design company. He was recently hired by Nate and Briana Austin to decorate Destilados de Agave. The Austins decided to revamp and rebrand their liquor store, Golden Liquors, as an agave spirits shop and tasting room. Beall’s landscapes of Oaxaca-inspired scenery can be found on the interior walls of the liquor store, and will soon be seen on the exterior as well, with the help of local artist Chad Bolsinger.

For the interior walls, Beall pulled an image of San Luis del Río’s agave fields in Oaxaca taken by multimedia journalist Tony White, then utilized the skills he had perfected while working at the museum to scale the image to size before applying it to the wall as a vinyl wrap. “When you first come in, the work was done to have the rustic ceiling and the bamboo, and to give you the feeling like you’re at a palenque in Oaxaca, Mexico,” Beall explains.

But the exterior walls of the store are an entirely different story. The vision is to have a massive, hand-painted street-side logo, something Beall hadn’t done on such a large scale. So he took the opportunity to learn and contacted Bolsinger, a well-known muralist whose colorful, dynamic artwork can be found on the walls of many Denver buildings – including the interior of Westword‘s office.

“I want to be clear on that, that [the logo] is not something I am doing personally, “Beall says. “I reached out to an artist that would be super comfortable in this.” He had initially planned to apply vinyl car wrap directly to the brick with heat treatment, but pivoted after discussing the project with Bolsinger

“I asked if he was interested in this and if I could work with him so I could continue to learn and gain the experience of doing something like that,” Beall says.