Wander Color Studio
The DC Artist painting your night as it happens.
Stephanie Ervin paints in real time. At a wedding, a grand opening, or a dinner party, she sets up with watercolors and a stack of paper and paints the guests one at a time while they watch. Brush hits wet paper, a face appears in a few minutes flat, and people carry their portraits home the same night, still a little damp.
She has been painting watercolors for over a decade. Before that, she studied seriously in New York under Joan Iaconetti. During the pandemic she painted constantly and opened a shop online, selling pet portraits and prints to strangers for the first time. When she saw other artists doing live guest portraits, she set a timer and painted small figures over and over to find out whether she could work fast enough. She could, and she has been chasing that speed ever since.
This fall, Artsy Ervin becomes Wander Color Studio. The name is a play on watercolor, and on wandering. Stephanie brings a sketchbook to restaurants and on trips and paints small montages of a meal or an afternoon at a winery. Michelin-starred plates are a favorite subject, because they are works of art already. The hospitality work grew out of that habit rather than out of a business plan, and it shows: there's a looseness to it that a pitch deck could never manufacture.
Some of that work: a pop-up dinner with six Michelin-starred chefs, where she designed the menus and painted the meal plate by plate, then assembled the paintings into a single piece that was printed and gifted to the chefs. An Earth Day pop-up at Rosewood Hotel Georgetown, where guests took home framed Earth-themed paintings. Florals at a DC Magazine party. An Amalfi-themed launch where she painted lemons and Aperol spritzes and let guests choose their own.
Stephanie lives in Glover Park, and in late September she's turning that neighborhood into an art destination. She and fellow artist Sarah Jamison are opening the doors of a private home there for Girlism, a salon-style pop-up show of work by women artists, hung floor to ceiling the way a Parisian apartment would hang it, walls dense with paintings that talk to each other. It runs September 25th through 27th and opens with a black-tie gala on Friday evening. The coalition behind it exists because the DC art scene still skews male, and Stephanie and Sarah wanted a room that didn't. Mark the weekend now: this is the kind of show you don't want to hear about after it's already come down.
Her studio is in the West End. The work is at wandercolor.studio.