Brush Monkeys and TreeTown Murals--Beautifying Ann Arbor & Beyond

By Sandor Slomovits • Photos By Susan Ayer and Hilary Nichols with additional photos provided by Brush Monkeys 

Ann Arbor has long had a tradition of downtown businesses featuring window paintings on their store fronts during the holiday season. When in 2006 local artist, John Copley noticed a break in that tradition, “I mentioned to Jim Hart of Seyfried Jewelers, that I had enjoyed the holiday window painting that someone had been doing downtown for a while. That year it was not happening. I asked him why and he said, ‘Well, he died. You want to do it?’ And that is where it all began.” 

Partnering with the Main Street Area Association, he decorated store windows for the 2006 holiday season. Soon, said Copley “I was working solo seven days a week during November, mostly eight hours a day, trying to keep up with demand.” It became clear that he needed an assistant. He asked Mary Thiefels, who he’d met through their mutual membership in Chelsea Painters, a collective of artists who organize an annual art show, share paintings, and critique each other’s work. 

At first, “It was just a seasonal thing,” said Thiefels. “It was meant to be about celebrating winter, the holiday spirit. It was never meant to feature any specific holiday, so November is when John would start. He came up with the name Novemberistas.” Laughingly she added, “For a number of years, we were the Novemberistas, and it was John’s vision that we were like this guerilla group of painters that would jump out of a van and paint the whole downtown and then get back in….” 

At some point, they were joined by Danijel Matanic, also a painter, and now Mary’s husband and business partner. “John started to take in others,” said Thiefels, “and the crew began to grow. He was just thrilled with how the art was changing now that there were different creative voices jumping in.” Eventually, in 2016 Copley said to Thiefels, “’It’s all you and Danijel. You take it from here.’ So, we sort of brought the company into the 21st century. We started to actually advertise. It was then that we rebranded.” They became the Brush Monkeys.

“The Brush Monkeys was John’s idea,” said Matanic. “He drew a sketch for it, and I took it and made it into the logo we use today—a kind of levitating, meditating monkey with a brush for a tail.” 

“We had started to notice that our winter clients also wanted spring windows, and then they also wanted fall windows,” said Thiefels. “We thought that this would be more all-encompassing of our year-round services, as opposed to Novemberistas, which kind of just branded us as being winter painters. We created a flyer, a postcard and stickers, and we’ve been able to get the word out. We have ten artists that work with us. We have about six in our hardcore crew that work year-round with us, then seasonally we bring on about five new helpers.” Matanic added, “The hardcore crew, the two of us, plus John Copley, Narooz Soliman, Lavinia Hanachiuc, and Colin Wilson, are the artists that are constant and actively working—doesn’t matter what kind of weather or time of year.”

John Copley, now in his mid-seventies, said, “I’m a genuine townie, born and raised in Ann Arbor, and have lived almost all my life in Washtenaw County.” He’s also been an artist all his life. After attending U-M Art School he has, among other things, painted traffic signs for the City of Ann Arbor, founded Crow Quill Graphics (a graphic design studio), painted murals in U-M residence halls, and painted scenery backdrops for plays and operas. 

Mary Thiefels, now in her forties, was also born and raised in Ann Arbor. “Until Danijel and I moved where we’re living now, I’ve lived a mile from Main Street my whole life.” She graduated with an art degree from Eastern Michigan University, “But even before my degree was finished, I was doing murals for commission, improving my craft, and entering competitions. I started answering the call around the state of Michigan for public art, and that’s when my interest in wanting to do murals for public enjoyment really kind of took off.” She worked with teens at the Neutral Zone as a full-time visual arts manager, from 2013 to 2019 while also simultaneously running Brush Monkeys and her other business, TreeTown Murals. (TreeTown Murals creates large public murals and mosaics. You’ve probably seen one of their largest on the back of the Courthouse Condos, downtown near the corner of Main and Huron, pictured on the cover of this issue. See the feature about TreeTown Murals in the CW Kids in the Community Column in Issue #77 of The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal or online here. 

Danijel Matanic, also in his forties, is from Serbia and got his degree from the Academy of Arts Novi Sad there. “I’m a painter and I’ve been doing art most of my life. The school was pretty competitive and back then the traditional media were taught. I did murals and paintings, and all sorts of media. After I moved here, I kind of continued doing the same thing,” Matanic shared.

When asked what made him decide to move to the US, he smiles and points to Thiefels. They’ve known each other for about ten years, been married for five, and run Brush Monkeys and TreeTown Murals together.  

“Danijel and I met, and our combined love of art and business has blossomed into these two companies,” added Thiefels. 

You need a lot of adjectives to describe the Brush Monkeys’ window paintings. Here’s a partial list from A to Z: artistic, brilliant, creative, dazzling, humorous, ingenious, masterful, original, whimsical, quirky, and zany. Their works range from relatively simple projects to highly detailed and ornate ones and encompass a wide range of styles and subject matter. “We really look at each window as if it’s a composition, including the display that the store front owner is working with,” said Thiefels. “We compliment and try to accentuate.” 

“It depends who we work with,” added Matanic. “Some people, they’re really specific. They know what they want. Others are more relaxed. They’re like, ‘Oh, its Brush Monkeys, you guys will figure it out.’ And most of the time we come up with something right there on the spot. In a group of creatives, that works, it’s very nice. In our hard-core crew, everyone is creative. Everyone has their own ideas. We kind of chat or have coffee, look at the window together, and then all kinds of ideas start sparking right there between us. And then we gotta sometimes kind of pull back and control [ourselves] if we start going too wild.” They laughed. 

John Copley still paints with the Brush Monkeys. “I enjoyed doing the seasonal work, and especially when people walking by would remark how they liked seeing me painting—how it made them happy that the holidays were coming and how it seemed to officially usher in the holiday season. Folks were very kind and supportive, and I truly enjoyed doing the work, even when it was bitter cold, or I was standing in an inch of slush. Thanks to Mary, I still make a cameo appearance every year, usually in partnership with my excellent nephew David Zinn. It is a young person’s calling.”

“These days we bring him to hang out with us. We don’t want to put too much work on the old man,” Matanic said jokingly. “He works as much as he enjoys, and he likes to hang out with the crew. We love him. We love to have him around.”

“He has an aesthetic and training different from ours, and he’s really taught all of us the background of sign painting, of lettering,” added Thiefels. “He taught us all how to paint on glass. Even though we have experience painting, there’s always a learning curve when—” 

“The medium is totally different,” Matanic finished her sentence. “You have to think about how light reflects and what affects it. There’s many things to it. Those basics we learned with John.” Thiefels added, “He’s definitely still our teacher.”  

“We have ritual parties before we start in November,” continues Thiefels. “Brushes up, glasses down is our kickoff party, and then brushes down, glasses up is our celebration party. The majority of our window clients are from November to mid-December. But we have about fifty businesses that are now wanting year-round services. Ann Arbor SPARK hires us every year—we do about twenty store fronts that SPARK pays for—to help get the word out about Tech Trek. We do all sorts of, ‘coming soon,’ ‘opening now,’ so it’s become like a visual enhancement to store fronts, not just for decoration, but also for announcements.” 

Thiefels continued, “Brush Monkeys and the Neutral Zone, running the art department and working with teenagers, was an excellent pairing.  I still have a lot of youth that I work with or that we have talked about bringing in as Brush Monkeys. We get a lot of inquiries from artists, ‘Do you need help?’ or, ‘Are you looking for an apprentice?’ We’ve been able to recruit young, emerging artists into Brush Monkeys that we’ve then nurtured and trained. And some of them help us on the murals as well.”

Every year we’re looking for new talent, we’ve called it kind of a micro economy for artists. We’ve been able to keep artists busy with this Brush Monkey company. It’s a chance for all of us to make money, but also to gift, and be of service. I feel like this line of work is in a way a service to the community.” 

Neither Thiefels, nor Matanic grew up in artistic families, but both were encouraged in their chosen work.

“I’m the only painter that I’m aware of in my immediate family line, or even in my ancestral family line,” said Thiefels. “But the element of whatever you’re doing, and supporting that, was very high and valued very much. I was never discouraged from following my passion of being an artist. Ever. It all just kind of escalated with my personal passion to be an artist. And to be of service. My family are all social workers, so maybe that’s part of it, too. Somehow the social aspect and the community connection that Brush Monkeys and TreeTown Murals has is in a way similar to what the values that my family, my parents taught.

“I don’t have any painters in my family,” said Matanic. “My mother used to paint and draw just for herself, as a side thing. But my grandparents were furriers. Everyone was always valuing craft or some kind of skill that you develop and nurture. Both my brother and I are kind of doing creative things in a different way. He’s doing a lot of wood carving and is a carpenter, so both of us kind of do creative work. And as Mary said, just like in her family, it was always encouraged; whatever you commit to, kind of keep going at it, and do it as much as you can. I was always taught that we, all humans, are capable of creativity in a certain way. What’s your drive? What field kind of grabs you? What are you interested to commit your time to, to get more creative and better at it over time?” 

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Brush Monkeys is continuing to grow and evolve as a business in a variety of ways. Among other things, they plan to open an online store for Brush Monkeys swag this year. “Until now we’ve been giving it [swag] away,” said Thiefels. “We buy a bunch each year and we just give it away. It’s fun. We get so much feedback, when people see that we’re painting, we often have that whole fan thing happen. ‘Whoa! Like the Brush Monkeys actually working! I’ve never seen you; I’ve only seen your art!’ They go on and on. And so, we have stickers on hand that we give to our fans. But we’re noticing that there’s certain aspects of Brush Monkeys that can, and that just needs, to grow. 

We call ourselves a collective. Even though Danijel and I manage the company, we really look to our crew of artists for ideas about how we can grow. One of our Brush Monkeys lives in Ferndale and is picking up a lot of work in his neighborhood in Detroit. He has a Brush Monkey kit, which has all the kind of signature supplies and the quality paint that we use, and he really has branched out on his own. What I would like to see is for more artists to learn from us, but have their own agency, to maybe develop this as a side hustle for themselves, use the Brush Monkey name and signature, stick to our core values and our high quality art. I think this is a potential tool for other artists to make a living.

I don’t want to use the word franchise, but you could think about it that way, in a sense. Why aren’t there Brush Monkeys in cities across the country doing this service in their communities? The city of Midland is a really good example. The judge of their court came down to Ann Arbor, saw our work, called, and had me come up and paint her home. She then threw a party where she invited all of the decision makers of downtown Midland, and the next year, the city of Midland hired the Brush Monkeys to come up and paint their entire downtown—at very little cost to the storefront owners.

So, we now go to Midland with five artists. We stay for five days, and we paint almost 50 storefronts. It has become an attraction for the Bay City area, that whole tri city area. We’re getting calls from towns across the state of Michigan, but it’s hard for us to travel if we don’t have incentive to maybe do more than one storefront. So, we’re looking at developing little pockets….” 

“And training already skillful artists that will work with us maybe a season or two,” added Matanic. “[They can] figure out how we do our thing, and then maybe they can continue training other younger, upcoming artists. Make some money out of it for themselves and be proud of doing something for their community. Maybe we’ll expand the business further. Maybe it’s gonna take over the world!”

“Well, we joke, but why not?” added Thiefels. “Why doesn’t the hardcore crew stop (in Michigan) on December 1st, and then go down to Miami and paint for two weeks during their holiday season? We do see the business growing. We’ve expanded beyond the Main Street area and even beyond Ann Arbor. Since the crew has grown, we’ve probably increased 25% every year. Last year we did 170 storefronts across Southeastern Michigan. It’s no longer just Washtenaw County. I think we were more spread out across the state of Michigan this year than ever, and we were in Toledo this spring. So, I think it’s just a matter of time before what happened in Midland happens in other cities.” 

During the pandemic, Brush Monkeys offered reduced rates for some of their customers who were particularly hard hit by the lockdowns. “They didn’t have a lot of pocket change to pay for it,” said Thiefels. “So, we did a lot of trade with restaurants and businesses in 2020. We just wanted to help, and this was our way. We also do a few pro bono stores. Every year we do the Delonis Center, no charge. We’ve talked about doing other nonprofits, no charge. It’s fun for us to show up for an hour or two and do something really quick. And then the gift keeps giving for months and months.”

And, continuing to talk about the intangible rewards of doing the work that Brush Monkeys does, Thiefels concludes, “It’s absolutely a hoot to be a Brush Monkey. We work outside you know, so we buy a box of hand warmers in October. You bundle up and then you have this outfit that is just covered in paint. It becomes your uniform. [Laughter.] We are a sight to see when you find us on the street painting. We love interacting with people—that’s a big part of the joy of it. We engage with people that want to talk. You don’t often get to see artists working, creating their craft. I know with the rise of Instagram and TikTok and all these videos, you do now see more painters, sign painters, and muralists working, but there’s something so mesmerizing about being able to watch someone create a work of art in front of you. Or to walk by, and then come back an hour later and see it finished. I like that it’s exposing people to a different kind of creativity watching us work, seeing it go down and what goes into it. I think that’s really special.”

Learn more about Mary Thiefels and Danijel Matanic by visiting them at brushmonkeys.com or treetownmurals.com. Connect with them on Facebook @BrushMonkeys, and on Instagram @brushmonkeys. Email them at treetownmurals@gmail.com or give them a call at (734) 846-4455.

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