It’s a splash of color amid a landscape largely devoid of it, counteracting the surrounding monotony like a rainbow cutting through a swath of persistent storm clouds.
Opposite a vacant piece of land southwest of town – all sand and scrub and rocks; faceless – there it stands, a one-story house with many stories to tell visually.
Aesthetically speaking, it speaks loud: capturing it is like looking through a kaleidoscope without the kaleidoscope, said instrument replaced by the walls of a multi-million dollar mansion filled with geometric shapes whose color palette answers the eternal question: what would it look like? if a lava lamp had a baby with a box of crayons?
The artwork wraps around the house’s east-north-facing facade, conveying a sort of tunnel effect that registers as a three-dimensional puzzle with a Tetris-like arrangement of cubes, diamonds, and other abstractions of the mind’s eye.
Pass the driveway lined with high-end vehicles — a purple Lamborghini Urus, a Carbahn BMW M8, a white Corvette Stingray, a GMC Denali, the jerry can that says “I wanna go fast juice” — and take a closer look : The longer you stare at it, the more it reveals itself.
That’s the whole point, according to the blue-haired, 30-year-old multimillionaire who commissioned the play.
“You really have to look at it and ask, ‘What’s going on here?'” explains Brandon Bowsky, who bought the house in September. “You can’t just look past it or take a look, you really have to see.
“I’m still finding stuff all the time,” he continues while contemplating the myriad details of the artwork, all those luminous nuances. “It makes you stop and actually focus. It’s kind of what it’s about: looking beyond the surface.”
But oh, how striking these surfaces are: you can spot Bowsky’s house half a mile away — keep going, crane your neck as you cruise down Buffalo Drive, it’s worth it.
In a city that has no shortage of luxury homes in the seven- and eight-figure range, Bowsky’s block is perhaps the most eye-catching in the valley, adorned with $50,000 worth of one-of-a-kind artwork.
“I didn’t buy the house because I was like, ‘I’m going to put a bunch of art on it,'” notes Bowsky. “I bought the house because I thought, ‘This is a great location, it’s a nice area, it’s very quiet.’ And after that I was like, ‘We have something here.’”
A blank slate worth $2 million
“If you come back here to the basketball court, you’ll kind of understand.”
Bowsky strolls past the huge pool in his football field-sized yard and climbs a few steps to get a better view of the back of his house.
He bought the place a few months ago because he has numerous friends in Vegas and, as an avid surfer and snowboarder, wanted to be closer to the mountains and Pacific Ocean. Looking at aerial photos from the back of his property, he saw a blank slate, a canvas that needed paint.
“I was like, ‘Man, this is a huge area, what am I supposed to do here?'” he recalls. “Imagine you’re up here looking back and it’s all just gray and there’s nothing else. It’s a bit boring.”
Boring?
Can’t have that.
Bowksy’s face underscores this: the inked ‘do, arms covered in tattoos, including a picture of a fire hydrant that reads, “I put out fires.”
“I got this tattoo because I was so tired of people asking what I did for a living,” he explains.
So what is Bowsky doing?
He is currently President and CEO of Minerva Marketing, the multi-pronged marketing and advertising agency he founded several years ago with roots in the insurance industry.
A former DJ producer in his native Florida — Bowsky still has a recording studio at his home — Bowsky left the music business in 2015 when he felt he needed to do something different with his life.
After a failed start, Bowksy was living in his car when an acquaintance told him he was doing a gig enrolling people in Medicare.
Fascinated, Bowksy received his insurance license and shortly thereafter founded his own insurance company, growing it into a multi-million dollar business before founding his marketing agency, which he now focuses on, with a focus on developing new technology for the industry.
Bowsky credits the skills he honed as an aspiring DJ for his later success in his career.
“I was good at networking, good at talking to people,” he says. “I did exactly the same thing in the insurance industry; got to know everyone in this room. Did the same in marketing. I think the business development skills I learned as a struggling DJ probably helped me a lot.”
All of this from a man with little formal education: Bowksy dropped out of high school when he was 15 after an argument in class with his AP psychology teacher.
“He said, ‘Since you know everything, why are you even here? You shouldn’t even be in school; you should just stop,’” Bowsky recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh, great idea.’ I literally did it that day – left school that day. That is my life.”
“Wait, is that real?”
Much of Las Vegas pulses with color: the neon lights of downtown; the bright lights of the strip, all that visual glare that served to widen eyes and lower inhibitions.
And yet residential neighborhoods evoke rather the opposite, shaded in the hues of the desert just outside their doors, lots of beiges and browns – earth tones galore – a tonal respite from the aesthetic opulence of tourist corridors.
For Denver artists Jake Amason and Megan Walker, who created the mural that adorns Bowsky’s home, the idea was to bring the spirit of the former to the latter.
“One of the reasons we chose the colors so light was because all the houses out there are really brown,” explains Amason. “So it’s kind of fun to just pop and make it stand out from the rest of the neighborhoods.
“I feel like Vegas is an example of freedom in America, in a way people go there to let go and do whatever they want,” he continues. “And so I felt like brown houses didn’t really fit my idea of Vegas. I feel like we’re inspired by the energy of downtown Vegas, kinda hectic, busy. It was kind of fun being in a city where maybe we could do something louder.”
How loud?
Deafening.
“We used pretty much every color,” Walker laughs. “We’ve ordered just about every color that Montana spray paint offers, and we probably used about 400 cans.”
Amason is a longtime friend of Bowsky’s and has also done artwork on two of Bowsky’s previous homes.
He and Walker, who are also a couple, started the mural in mid-October and finished in late November, often working from sunrise to sunset, with some inclement weather in the form of high winds and rain extending the project by a couple of weeks .
Her goal: to evoke a feeling of disbelief, to make you wonder what exactly you are seeing.
“We wanted it to be like a desert oasis — or a mirage,” says Walker. “So if you’re wandering through the desert and you come across this thing, you’re like, ‘Wait, is that real?'”
A public art gallery
“It’s super weird inviting you to my restroom with me.”
Bowsky leads a tour of the artwork in his home, stopping in one of his bathrooms, lit by a surrealist painting by Amason.
Art is everywhere here, from several black light/UV paintings, to a large acrylic heart he won at a charity auction, to images of a deconstructed Scrooge McDuck in his studio.
“I definitely have an art gallery that’s worth a lot of art, that’s for sure,” he notes.
And now the facade of his home doubles as a public gallery of sorts, complete with unexpected visitors who stumble upon the site and want to see the artworks up close.
Ask the guy who owns the place – he might just show you around when he’s not working.
“I don’t really mind,” Bowksy says of strangers stopping by to see the mural. “I’m super happy to show it to pretty much everyone when I’m not busy, just hanging out and someone comes over and says, ‘Oh, that’s so cool.’
“For example, some people have asked me, ‘Would it be cool if our kids could come over and see it?'” he continues. “I don’t care. Just tell me when and don’t come with an ax to murder me.”
Having recently planned the painting’s sealing, he hopes it will last about five years – and then he’ll likely commission a new one.
With no HOA and no rules for maintaining a property in his neighborhood, he is free to paint his house as he pleases.
He says most of his neighbors have not complained about the artwork, save for a woman across the street who called it an eyesore.
That’s OK: That’s art.
“That’s the cool thing about art: it’s subjective,” says Bowsky. “Everyone has the right to love it or not to love it, right?”
Contact Jason Bracelin at [email protected] or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram.
