Editor鈥檚 note: is presented here as it was first published in the College of Letters and Science Magazine in 2016.
Just before completing her undergraduate degrees in art studio and Italian in 2008, Sofia Lacin was hired to paint a mural at the Davis restaurant where she worked. It was a big wall so she recruited her high school friend Hennessy Christophel to help.
鈥淚t was difficult, but we had fun,鈥 said Lacin, who grew up in Sacramento. 鈥淚 found out I liked painting out in the open and solving the problems involved.鈥
Business focused on large fine-art projects
That restaurant painting led the two women to form an art-making partnership specializing in murals. After a few years that included some commercial jobs, the duo 鈥 dubbed 鈥 began concentrating solely on large fine-art projects.
The two recently did their first out-of-state project (in Knoxville, Tenn.), painted a mural in the underpass leading into the Napa Valley town of this fall and are working out details for two Los Angeles projects.
Highest-profile art is under Highway 50
Their biggest and highest-profile artwork so far is Bright Underbelly, a 70,000-square-foot mural on a portion of the underside of Highway 50 in Sacramento known as the W-X Freeway, completed in March.
The job that really launched LC Studio Tutto can be seen in Davis at Mace Boulevard and Interstate 80, a mural on a 4 million-gallon water storage tank that was selected from a nationwide call.
Painting murals is physically demanding, exhausting work.
For Bright Underbelly, the duo spent many cold winter weeks lying on their backs painting as the highway above them shook with the passing of thousands of cars and trucks.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 the easy part,鈥 Lacin said with a laugh.
Doing the math in an art career
Half their time is spent on job proposals, meetings, making calls and organizing finances. Another 35 percent is art research and design. About 15 percent is brush-in-hand time.
When it comes to making a living making art, Lacin had the benefit of growing up in a household that blended art and commerce. Her parents, Kent and Greta Lacin, own a long-running Sacramento photography and media business. (Her father earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from 海角社区 in 1974.)
鈥淚 didn鈥檛 study the market or do a lot of research,鈥 she said. 鈥淲e were walking a fine line,
inventing a career we didn鈥檛 know existed.鈥
You have treat an art career 鈥榓s a job鈥
Her advice for making a creative career work is a mix of idealistic and practical: 鈥淣ever lose sight of your curiosity and always be willing to do something you don鈥檛 know how to do. Take risks, but be smart in how you take risks. Surround yourself with people you think are really talented. And you also really have to treat it as a job 鈥攜ou go to work every day like any other job.鈥
For her, it has paid off. Recently the partners left Sacramento to seek better connections to the international public art world, with Lacin heading to Los Angeles and Christophel to the Bay Area.
Jeffrey Day is the content strategist for humanities, arts and cultural studies. Devoted to communicating about the arts and humanities, Jeffrey earned a degree in anthropology.