How Waterloo grad and muralist Stephanie Boutari learned to trust her gut and follow her art
“It’s hard to be creative when you’re afraid,” muralist Stephanie Boutari (BAS ’11, MArch ’14) reflected. Today, Boutari is a successful artist, and her colourful murals appear in commercial and public spaces across Ontario. However, her journey to this point has been a long and winding one as she gained the confidence to pursue her true passion.
“Too often, people think they don’t know anything, or they don’t trust themselves. When I work on a piece, I try my best to shut out self-doubt and negative thoughts and lean into what my gut is telling me. It’s so easy to succumb to external pressure, to believe you have to do things a certain way. But I’m most proud of my work — and at my happiest — when I trust myself.”
As a child, art was one of Boutari’s favorite things to do, but she didn’t think it was a realistic option to pursue professionally. “I had this image of the starving artist and didn’t think art was something I could actually do as a career,” Boutari said.
As a teenager, she decided to enrol in the University of Toronto’s architecture program, hoping that it would provide her with a stable career path while also being a creative outlet. After a year at the University of Toronto, she transferred to the University of Waterloo because of its co-op program, and then enrolled in the Master of Architecture program a year after graduating with her undergraduate degree. “Throughout my classes, I always really missed art,” Boutari said. “I wanted a way to bring it back to my everyday life.”
While completing her master’s degree, Boutari researched the way that colour, light and design in architecture influenced individuals’ moods. “I liked my master’s program because we had more space to experiment and follow our passions,” she said. “We were encouraged to be more creative, and more radical, to question the standard way of doing things. We thought not just about individual happiness, but also collective happiness, and how buildings could contribute to that happiness.”
Boutari was particularly interested in public art, and for her master’s thesis she decided she wanted to paint a mural herself. There was a building near the School of Architecture in Cambridge, so Boutari approached the owner and asked if she could paint it for free.
“I had never painted a mural before — had never even painted with spray paint before,” she said. “But the owner was really nice, and even paid for my paint himself. Painting that mural made me realize I wanted to keep doing this — but I didn’t have the courage yet.”
After graduation, Boutari got a full-time job in an architect’s office, but she found the work stressful and frustrating. Even as her 9 to 5 was wearing her down, her hobby was taking off. “The great thing about murals is that they’re often public,” she said, “so you get a lot of work through exposure and word of mouth.” Soon, Boutari was working on more murals in her spare time.
Then, in 2017, she was forced to reckon with the consequences of sidelining her artistic dreams: her appendix burst, and she had to undergo emergency surgery. “It felt like a wakeup call,” she said. “I decided to do murals full-time and have been ever since.” Today, Boutari completes 9 to 12 murals a year, often with a specific focus on bringing colour, energy and playfulness to a space. She was recently commissioned to create a mural about joy in the local Cadillac Fairview mall, and she has also won a Communicator Award of Excellence along with Waterloo’s Creative Studio for a math-themed mural in the Math and Computing building.
Boutari’s work has also brought her closer to her community: she recently painted a mural across from a Toronto apartment building, and throughout the process, residents stopped by to thank her and express how excited they were to have something beautiful to look at every day. “I never could have expected that this would be what I get to do every day,” she said. “It’s such an amazing thing to have a positive impact on a stranger by doing something that I love to do — by making art.”
