About

My name is Ed Irmen and I’m a Detroit based artist, art handler and muralist.

I was born in Southfield Michigan, and moved across Detroit and Detroit metro before being relocated to Arizona and then back to Michigan while I was in High School. A rolling stone gathers no moss.

The constant change of scenery and consistent efforts by my Dad to take me camping and hiking while living west of the Mississippi filled my creative brain with images of mountains, forests, critters and birds.

I live and work in Detroit, always lending a hand to a fellow muralist or gallery that needs art on the wall. I still go camping and hiking and absolutely love to travel. I even bought a van to carry my paint while I traverse the country looking for new walls and new communities to impact.

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My work is an exploration of color and shape, using birds and animals in the guise of human emotion and condition, the paintings are truly a reflection of their creator.

Gazing beyond the typical understanding of a painter and their paintings, my challenge is to explain internal strife and answer the tough questions of existence and identity through art. My work ranges from the desire to escape the human condition to the complexity of conflict. With selective vibrancy, my color choices are saturated and designated to the subject. This ensures that the artwork is both beautiful and instinctive, much like creatures found in the paintings. I like to focus on the absurdity of figure, the complex shapes and curves naturally lend themselves to become a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing image. Compiled with lush environments explained in abstraction, and concepts derived from basic screen printing techniques, which my work separates from the traditional paintings of flora and fauna.

I prefer to practice on large scale surfaces, lending more opportunity and space to explore patterns and the relationships between the image and the narrative. The large canvas gives more room for the viewer to interpret and make their own assumptions of the story. Having engaged in subject matters as diverse as gentrification, race, and inclusion, my work produces familiar two dimensional shapes that line up with both the subject and the understood feelings invoked.

To be a bird is to be limitless in the realm of three dimensional movement, and in reflection, so is the human experience.

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Ed has exhibited work in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Traverse city and across the midwest. He has created murals for brands like 1XRUN, Replay Cafe, Tapped, Folio Offices and Rocket Mortgage. As a logistics whiz, Ed has facilitated countless murals by other artists through programs like City Walls, Murals in the Market, Paxahau Rocket Mortgage Small Business Mural Project and more.