POLO — Some artists might look at pipes and conduit crawling over a blank canvas and let it drive them up a wall. For Nick Gjonola, things like that drive him to a wall.

For him, they’re like pieces of a puzzle that the artist enjoys solving. They’re not obstacles, they’re opportunities, and from his basement studio in Polo, he comes up with ways to utilize the utilitarian as part of his art.

And that blank canvas? It doesn’t stay blank for long — and it’s usually not canvas either. More often than not, it’s brick and mortar, drywall, or metal.

Gjonola, 45, owns Midwest Murals, which has transformed walls into works of art by bringing new life to otherwise lifeless surfaces, making drywall dynamic and adding splashes of color to concrete and bursts of creativity to bricks. His work can be found throughout Illinois, including his own hometown, and beyond.

Painting murals on, or in, buildings can be a tall order, which is just fine with Gjonola. For him, when it comes to his art, “the sky’s the limit.” No idea is too far outside the box — and sometimes the idea is a box. Like the time he turned a wardrobe closet into a juice box. Then there was that time he turned a quonset hut into a soup can (more on that a little later).

In addition to murals, Gjonola also does private commissions for paintings on canvas, as well as pieces for his own pleasure.

When it comes to his own work, Gjonola often draws inspiration from pop culture characters from his childhood. He turned a wall in his basement studio in Polo into a Frankenstein-themed mural — with Mr. and Mrs. from the movies emblazoned across the brick — camouflaging the conduit and outlet boxes he encountered along the way. Challenges like that are part of what he enjoys about the creative process.

“An artist is at their best when they have time and limited resources,” Gjonola said. “I had these things that I had to do something with, there were no variables. That’s when the real creativity comes out, because you have to be creative.”

The arts runs in the family.

Gjonola grew up in Polo with his parents, Dick and Pat, who moved there to be close to Pat’s family. Nick’s parents once were stage actors in Los Angeles, and met while working there. Some of their acting work in industrial musicals — stage productions created for corporate conventions and sales meetings — was recently revived in the 2019 film “Bathtubs over Broadway,” directed by Dava Whisenant. Dick, who died in 2009, also played the Burger King in a series of television commercials for the fast food company, right around the time Nick was born. Pat still lives in Polo.

Nick’s childhood had its difficulties, having been diagnosed with childhood leukemia at age 4 and dealing with the illness for five years. This gave him lots of downtime, but also difficulty socializing as a child, so he turned to drawing to pass the time. Some of his first sketches were displayed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he spent time in recovery; and nearly 35 years later, those talents have led him to a full time job in art.

“It seemed like every time I came back from the hospital, I was having to entertain to help remake some of the friends that I had lost because I was constantly being taken out of school,” Nick said. “My friend group was gone, being 5, 6, 7 years old. I don’t know if that led into art at all, but I had a lot of time on my hands, literally, being in bed and sick. A lot of times, I was stuck with pencil and paper, so I just kind of taught myself to draw.”

Gjonola’s journey from drawing to painting took another turn when he was asked to paint an Incredible Hulk mural at his friend’s home. That was around 15 years ago, and the finished work gave him more confidence in his abilities.

“That was the first thing that I painted, and I stepped back and realized that it turned out real well,” Gjonola said. “I got in a flow state while I was doing it, so eight hours felt like about 30 minutes. It was awesome. I loved it. I’ve realized as time goes by that I enjoy it.”

Pop culture pops up elsewhere in his basement studio. A sump pump and fuse box have gotten new looks inspired by one of Nick’s favorite movies, “Ghostbusters,” and a wardrobe closet has been painted to look like another homage to the movies: a Hi-C Ecto Cooler juice box that was popular among children in the late 1980s.

“It was just a dirty corner that I didn’t know what to do with it,” Gjonola said. “I didn’t know what to do with the sump pump, so I started painting it and put stuff on it,” including pink foam shaped like slime from the movie.

Projects like that — incorporating everyday objects into works of art — are similar to adaptive reuse, wherein buildings are repurposed for uses other than originally intended.

Take, for example, a metal quonset hut in Polo that was painted to look like a Campbell’s soup can, which is what Gjonola did with it in 2023. His friend Dustin Finkle owned the building at the northeast corner of Division Ave. and Buffalo St., and approached Gjonola with a task to give the exterior a new look.

“He said, ‘Let’s make it something cool,’” Gjonola said. “We came up with a few different things. We were just dabbling with different ideas. We wanted to stay away from the typical things, especially since we had that shape. It looked like a can. I think it’s a cool mural that utilizes the shape.”

The soup-er sized work of art looks like a giant soup can laying on its side and half-buried in the ground. Instead of the Campbell’s name, the word “Polo” is written in the similar style, and the lower part of the can reads “Home of the Marcos.” It’s a project that would have made Andy Warhol proud.

The arched shape of the hut made it a fun challenge for Gjonola, as opposed to working on a flat slate.

“A blank slate can be tough because the sky’s the limit,” Gjonola said, but when the project is shaped like half a soup can, he said it’s actually easier. “It doesn’t look too folky. For the shape that it is, I think it’s bold enough and it works.”

And people all over the world can even see his soup can, as it’s visible from space — or, rather, the satellites that capture images for Google Maps.

About a year later, in the summer of 2024, Gjonola was commissioned by the City of Polo to work on a mural incorporating the city’s history, including Abraham Lincoln (who once visited), and Polo founder Zenes Aplington, onto a building near Louise Quick Park. The mural takes up the entire exterior wall and features both men, along with an old Illinois Central steam train and the former depot, with a crowd of women near it, a scene he found in an old photograph. The mural also includes pine trees and a scene of the prairie beyond town. An old road map fills the background.

“I took an image of Lincoln and an image of Aplington, and wanted to involve a train,” Gjonola said. “I had to use reference images, and as I was going through them, I found the train with the girls and the depot.”

Elsewhere in Polo, Gjonola has done works of wall art at places such as the former Pinecricker Cafe, Dambman Lawn Mower Hospital, The Polo Room and Polo High School. He also created a “Greetings from Oregon” mural in a post card style at Merlin’s Greenhouse in Oregon. He is currently working on designing a mural in Morrison, pending a wall repair that needs to be done.

Gjonola’s mural talents recently brought him to the job he has working with Rock Candy Paint Crew, which paints the colorful wall art inside Playa Bowls locations. Playa Bowls is a restaurant with locations all over the country that serves healthy acai, pitaya, coconut bowls and smoothies. His work sometimes takes Gjonola away from home for long stretches of time, and he’s been to Florida, Colorado, Tennessee, New Jersey, Texas and several states in between.

Much of the wall art at Playa Bowls is repetitive, but even still, the process has its perks: “The biggest benefit of the job is that I know how much practice I’m going to get,” he said.

Having a steady flow of work recently has been a welcome relief for Gjonola. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, he owned a home decor sign making business, but the rising price of wood during the pandemic forced him out of that. He also owns Nosh Skateboards, creating art for the bottoms of skateboards, but he is currently retooling the business as his traveling work takes priority.

For anyone hoping to follow a similar artistic path, Gjonola says the biggest ingredient isn’t inspiration — it’s persistence.

“It would just be to practice,” Gjonola said. “You just got to do it. Find something to do it with and do it on. I started with a pencil. Once you learn contrast and shading with black and white, doing it with color makes a lot of sense, then you’re just working with tone.”

Find Midwest Murals on Facebook to learn more about Nick Gjonola’s work, and what he’s currently doing.

Click here to view the Polo “soup can” from above on Google Maps.