The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Fucci is the nom de plume of Peter Bue, whose signature paintings can be found inside and outside stores, coffee haunts, and restaurants all over the Twin Cities, with the highest count in Uptown and Lyn-Lake. That painting of Pee-Wee on his cruiser outside Penn Cycle? That’s a Fucci. Woody Allen moping on the side of Specs, the glasses shop at 22nd and Hennepin? Fucci. The party scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Via’s Vintage Wear? Fucci again. And there are many more. He’s been painting around town for 15 years, but only within the past few years has he been selling paintings and murals faster than you can say Holly Golightly.

I went to see Bue last month at his studio in the Calhoun Arts Building on Lyndale and Lake. When I knocked on his door, the loud rock music that had been blasting was turned down and Bue, a forty-something guy with a long grey ponytail and a quick smile, appeared in the doorway. He waved me inside his dimly lit workspace, where a crowded jumble of paint cans dripped various shades of gray. In-progress paintings leaned seven-deep against the baseboards. There was a second-hand Victorian couch that’s been worked over by more than a few cats, and a fireplace Bue painted to look like marble. Among the finished paintings crowding the upper walls, Marlon Brando and Barbara “Jeannie” Eden smoldered and smirked down at us.

This is the think-tank where Bue plans his big murals, and where he paints small stuff, like the “off-the-rack” 4x6-footers he’s been showing lately in the 34th and Hennepin Dunn Bros. “So what’s with the ‘Fucci’?” I asked. “Well, when I was getting started with the murals, I wanted to have a name that would go with my work. It was the 80s, and both Ferrucci jeans and Gucci were real popular, so I combined the two and got Fucci.” Even if you’re not close enough to see the distinctive signature, you can tell his work by the confident, heavy brushstrokes and pop-culture subject matter. Bue definitely has a thing for movie stars, particularly from the 1950s and 60s.

He remembers watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, James Bond movies, films by the Rat Pack, and Marlon Brando’s The Wild One on TV as a teen. “Painting this stuff is how I feel young again,” Bue said. He also sticks to the pop-culture material because he likes being able to pay rent every month. “I needed to make something that was saleable, and subject matter from film and television made sense because it’s already in people’s heads. It’s stuff people like, so they buy it.” And why are most of his paintings colorless? “I paint these people in black and white because that was how I first saw them, on my black-and-white TV. Plus it gives me my own niche,” he says. “Who else do you know who’s painting murals in black-and-white?”

Typically, Bue’s work begins by taking snapshots of the film or TV moment he wishes to paint—he jogs the DVD in slow-mo until he gets the frame he wants, then takes a picture with a 35mm camera. Bue says that the great thing about taking stills out of films is that “the scene has already been set up and balanced, and the models are professional actors.” He blows up the picture at Kinko’s and has it color transparencied. He then projects this onto a large masonry board, traces the projection onto the surface, and begins painting in the details. Toward the end of the painting process, Bue stops looking at the original snapshot and focuses exclusively on the painting. “Nobody sees the original that I work from,” he said. “They only see the painting, so it needs to make sense on its own.” He then installs the Fuccified masonry board outside the store or restaurant that commissioned the work. (With some older work, Bue painted directly onto the brick or stucco.)Although murals are the mainstay of the Fucci business, Bue frequently paints for private residences. “A friend just had me do some work for a dog wedding anniversary party,” he tells me. “A dog wedding anniversary?” I ask. “Correct. And the dog couple was wearing little outfits.” I descended into a three-second mini-depression over the injustice of dogs in dresses before I realized that at least while they were writhing in their finery, the canine couple could take in an eyeful of Fucci magic. He constructed a bar on wheels for the party, decorated the top with Xeroxed pictures of dogs, and added painted wooden moldings. He did two wall paintings, too: One of four Quaker Oatmeal boxes, the last with the dog-owner’s face instead of the Quaker’s. The other mural mimicked the old Coppertone ad—the one with the pooch pulling down the child’s swimsuit—replacing the original dog with the proud canine wife. “A lot of my stuff is personal and jokey like that,” Bue says.

Sometimes Bue must rely on his own skills to improvise. A case in point is the sidewalk sign at Murray’s restaurant downtown, on which a smiling butler kindly offers a chalkboard menu to passersby. “I was going to use the butler from the movie Tomb Raider, but I couldn’t get a good shot of him off the DVD. So I found this picture of my friend Johnny, and his body position was just what I needed for the guy on the sign.” The only problem was that John had been partying the night before the picture was taken, so he had droopy hangover eyes and a pained smile. But Bue was able to successfully tweak John’s expression from “I want to die” to “Have some pie?” “I just perked up the face a little,” he says.

Perhaps the keenest thing about Fucci’s work is its power to unify stores that don’t otherwise have anything in common other than location. Fantasy Gifts, for instance, has always been the embarrassing drunk auntie in the family of Lyn-Lake stores. It was only after the “adult gift shop” followed the neighboring stores’ lead a couple of summers ago and commissioned a mural by Fucci that the locals seemed to embrace it. The classy parody of Caillebotte’s Paris: A Rainy Day somehow gives Twin Citizens permission to ogle the mannequins in feather-lined panties next to it without embarrassment. After all, it’s art, right?

While Bue seems to have a corner on the market, he’s not the only commercial muralist in town. Kyle Holdridge has been painting in the Twin Cities for 15 years. He’s created more than 30 local murals; the most prominent is the bar scene on the Town Hall Brewery at Seven Corners. Holdridge charges anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 to gussy up the side of a building, and that kind of lucre allows the painter to spend his winters in the Florida Keys. Paul Mulcahy has also been painting the town for over a decade. His claim to fame is the stunning trompe l’oeil work on Saint Sabrina’s at 28th and Hennepin. He told me that works of that scale cost his clients around $5,000.

Compared with Holdridge and Mulcahy, Bue’s work is quite a bargain. This might explain why, despite the amount of work he has around town and a steady flow of requests, Bue still has to log hours at the print shop he’s worked at for 17 years to make ends meet. In exchange for transforming a wall into a movie still, Fucci asks for a mere $900 to $3,000, depending on the size and amount of detail.

While his competitors claim that the mural market is still booming, Bue feels like he’s almost farmed all the nutrients out of the field. He’s started showing and selling smaller, portable paintings. Bue said he was excited about showing his stuff at coffee shops, like his recent exhibit at a Hennepin Avenue coffee shop. “I mean, 500 people walk into that Dunn Bros. every day, and that’s a lot of potential buyers for my work.” Some of Bue’s friends are thinking about backing him for his own gallery. That would mean that Fucci fans could see his work without going on a walking tour of Uptown, and it would also allow Bue to quit his part-time job. “Getting my own gallery is the carrot I’m chasing now. It’s getting really close, but it’s just kinda spooky taking the jump, you know?”