Historic church wall becomes a canvas for new Estes Park mural

Estes Park’s collection of outdoor public art is about to gain another landmark.

Artist Kevin O’Brien is transforming the west wall of The Stanley Chocolate Factory into a three-panel mural resembling a stained-glass window—a fitting tribute to the building’s earlier life as the Presbyterian Community Church of the Rockies.

When you look up at the mural from Cleave Street, it is almost like you are inside looking at the windows in the former church.

The triptych draws inspiration from artist Albert Bierstadt’s 1877 painting of Estes Park, commissioned by Windham Thomas Windham-Quin, the Fourth Earl of Dunraven. Bierstadt’s landscape hung for decades at Adare Manor, the Dunraven family estate in County Limerick, Ireland, before Roger B. Mead purchased it in 1955 and donated it to the Denver Public Library the following year. Today, the painting is part of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum.

Although O’Brien is best known for hand-painted glassware rather than large-scale murals, the project allows him to bring that signature style outdoors. His glasswork, available at Aspen and Evergreen, The Stanley Chocolate Factory, and at StudioO’Brien on Etsy, frequently features aspens, pines, birds, butterflies, and hearts. In 2023, he collaborated with Velina Davidson and Kiara Azure on the mural at Sage and Seed Studio in Peak to Peak Plaza, 343 S. St. Vrain Ave.

Each of the mural’s three panels requires about three days to complete. O’Brien, a high school art teacher in Ft. Collins, first sketched the overall composition on paper, but once he began work on the mural, he began painting freehand, without projecting or tracing a full-scale outline onto the building.

He is using an exterior acrylic paint with built-in ultraviolet protection and plans to apply a protective varnish after the mural is complete to help preserve the artwork.

Painting a mural about two stories above ground level has presented its own challenges. Because the terrain along the building’s west side is uneven, the scaffolding has been stabilized with additional rockwork and secured with ropes to the roof for added safety.

Once the triptych is finished, O’Brien plans to paint another recessed panel closer to ground level at the back of the building. He has not yet settled on a design, although he is considering an ice cream theme to celebrate The Stanley Chocolate Factory’s new ice cream parlor, which opened over Memorial Day weekend.

Meanwhile, construction continues on the building’s addition that will house a vintage-styled carousel. The carousel’s menagerie and operating mechanism are expected to arrive later this week and be operational sometime in mid-August.