KC artist creates Chiefs mural for fans who nearly lost home to fire one year ago
The last year hasn’t been the best for Ed and Mary Ellen Hughes. A year of inconvenience, they call it.
Three days before St. Patrick’s Day last year, fire ravaged the home where they have lived more than 23 years on a cul-de-sac in Liberty. They had to move into a nearby apartment while construction crews put the house back together.
They get to move back home on March 31, though — and when they do, Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid and Travis Kelce will be waiting for them there.
As they planned the rebuild, the longtime Kansas City Chiefs fans decided to add something extra to the basement where they watch games on TV.
The owners of Northland Rolladium Skate Center called someone they knew — Kansas City artist Craig Greco of Greco Paintworks, who had painted two murals for them at the family’s skating rink.
Greco has become known in local art circles for his hyper-realstic painting style. He likes to say he will paint anything that will sit still.
NFL cleats. KitchenAid mixers. Cars. Cornhole boards. Walls.
The three huddled and came up with an idea for a mural showcasing Chiefs eras, homage to the team’s history from coach Hank Stram’s leadership in the ‘60s and ‘70s to current stars Mahomes and Kelce (not to mention Reid).
The way Greco brought that idea to life captured thousands of views on social media in recent days after he posted a video of himself airbrushing the wall — and the couple’s reaction to the finished work.
He painted images of Chiefs greats past and present. There’s head coach Reid kissing the Super Bowl trophy, quarterback Mahomes throwing a pass while horizontal in midair and Hall of Fame QB Len Dawson puffing on a cigarette in an image football fans know well.
The video has earned nearly 35,000 likes on Instagram, including one from Tavia Hunt, wife of Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt.
Ed and Mary Ellen would like to have one (or two) players autograph the wall, but they’re not looking for a freebie. “And in return we would offer our skating rink to use as a fundraiser for their foundation,” said Ed.
Chiefs fans have become so invested in the wall that they’re commenting that “you left this guy off and that guy off and they’re totally right, they’re 100% right,” said Greco.
“And it’s just because I didn’t have a massive hallway to do this. I had one space and they had a few requests. Mary Ellen wanted (defensive lineman George) Karlaftis. And she had to have Travis.
“I knew that with Travis being on there ... I was like, ‘Man, when I find the Travis image I want to paint I want to include something that had a little touch of Swiftie to it.’ So I used Travis with the heart hands. I just thought that was the epitome of who Travis was and where he’s at right now.
“I had some other players in there and we just decided to take them out because it was a little too cluttered. So the ones that are in there are the ones that collectively we really loved.”
No disrespect to anyone who didn’t make the cut, like Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt.
“I need to (paint) all the way around the room,” Greco laughed. “I just need more time and more space.”
From KitchenAids to police station murals
The wall reflects how Greco transformed his own life, turning a side gig into a new career when he left law enforcement in January 2023 to paint full-time.
He taught himself how to draw after becoming entranced by 3D sidewalk art he saw online. Then he fell down a rabbit hole watching YouTube videos of West Coast airbrush artists who customize cars.
“This all started 15 years ago when I stumbled upon some YouTube videos. I don’t have any formal education, so to speak. But that’s where I taught myself,” he said.
He admired the automotive artwork, “but I just never dove into it here,” he said. “It’s kind of difficult to make an automotive living, so to speak, unless you’re in the body shops and I wasn’t in the body shops because I was doing police work for the first 20 years of my career.
“So, for me, I practiced on helmets and canvases and all sorts of different substrates, just out of my home.”
He became known to KC fans for the colorful cleats he customizes for Chiefs players for the NFL’s annual My Cause My Cleats campaign — players, coaches and staff wear special shoes showing support for their favorite causes.
He estimates he’s painted cleats for more than 30 Chiefs players so far — Rashee Rice, Chris Jones and Harrison Butker among them — and has seen his handpainted shoes worn at four Super Bowls.
As much as he enjoys airbrushing shoes, mural work has given him canvases big enough to express his passion for honoring people’s stories — as he did with a mural he painted at the North Kansas City Police Department. The work honors officer Daniel Vasquez, killed in the line of duty in July 2022.
“Once I picked up the skills, I took that from this automotive genre of artwork and brought those skills over to mural work,” Greco said.
“There’s hardly anyone, especially in the Midwest, that’s airbrushing murals and using the techniques that I am, so that’s why my murals look different from everyone else’s. That’s what I’m really trying to do, is separate myself from everyone else.
“When I started doing murals, I really felt like I had so much more to offer the world in terms of abilities. I’d made this really big name in footwear. But it’s not where my sole passion is at. I love doing that, but I love being able to crank out murals that really tell a story.”
So when the Hugheses called, he was ready.
It could have been James Bond on the wall
Mary Ellen first thought she’d like to see some of her favorite movie actors on that large, curved wall. She’s particularly fond of 007 himself, Sean Connery.
But she figured her husband of 46 years would be more excited about something sports-related — and she was right.
Painting Karlaftis, who joined the Chiefs in 2022, on the wall was a special request from Mary Ellen; she thinks the defensive end looks like their son-in-law.
Ed wanted to include “the Nigerian nightmare, Christian Okoye,” and something that would seem “kind of weird.” So he requested the iconic image of Dawson, sitting on a folding chair at haltime of the first Super Bowl, taking a drag of his cigarette with a bottle of Fresca on the floor in front of him.
That photo, snapped by a Life magazine photographer, became so closely associated with Dawson that it made the rounds on social media before he died in 2022 at age 87.
“We had to have Lenny in there,” said Greco. “When you start searching images and you start thinking of him, there’s one that comes to everyone’s mind.
“I don’t know how true it is, I presume it’s true. But someone in the comments section said that Lenny had mentioned if there’s one photo that he does not like and he wishes he could take back or erase from the world, that would be it.
“But it’s so iconic of that era, too, when it wasn’t unusual to smoke ... but if you saw that today people would just be flabbergasted. So I think that kind of dichotomy of the two eras, how times have changed, is amazing.
“And the interesting thing is, if you’re going to paint Lenny sitting in that chair, with his helmet behind him, you wouldn’t blow that up to some extraordinarily large size. I kind of wanted it to be real, or relatively real.
“And so the area that I put him, right under the staircase where I was running out of room ... I was like, ‘What do you put in this kind of awkward triangle space I’m working in?’ It was great. I was able to fit him and his chair in there and he didn’t look too big or too small, and I just thought it fit perfectly.”
Greco chose to recreate a photo of Mahomes flying through the air because “when I think of him I just think this guy’s a magician. He’s a football wizard. He’s not like anyone else,” Greco said.
“So his photo, his pose, it can’t be like anyone else’s. And when you think of Mahomes you think of him throwing these weird side angle passes, you think of him perfectly parallel to the ground, chucking a ball the entire length of a field.
“So that’s where, again, I came up with that image. And I think, it was almost an afterthought in terms of how well it worked, because it draws your attention from Hank Stram on the right and the right side of the curved wall and it pulls your eye all the way around to the other side.
“I thought, man, that kind of diagonal, like, horizontal look of Mahomes, it did more than fill that space — it actually pulls everything together, so it was perfect.”
Fans have littered Greco’s social-media posts about the mural with fire emojis and hearts.
“Len Dawson! This is so amazing, I love it!! Love, a Broncos fan,” one woman wrote on Facebook.
Though only a handful of people have seen it in person “everybody is going nuts over it,” said Mary Ellen. “The electrician was in there on Saturday and he looked at me and goes, ‘Cool wall.’”
Until this week, when he was photographed by The Star, Greco hadn’t seen the completed mural, either. At least not the way the Hugheses see it.
Greco has color-blindness.
“I can see colors, I just don’t see them like you do,” he said. “I’m red-green colorblind, which is ironic for this mural.”
He has expensive EnChroma glasses that help him see the spectrum of hues and tints, but he doesn’t wear them as he paints.
“A lot of people ask and then they look at me funny when I say I don’t,” he said. “I’ve taught myself to kind of comprehend and compensate and how to paint without them and I’ve learned how to color-match without them. So when I put them on, I feel like it throws me off.
“My other concern is I feel very particular about the glasses because I airbrush so much, and with that comes overspray, and overspray lands on everything, and I don’t want to damage the glasses. So I tend to not wear them.
“Sometimes I’ll put them on and then look at my artwork afterward and go, ‘Damn, that’s pretty cool. Never really saw that coming.’
.jpg)