Business & Tech

A Partnership Made in Murals

McCann's Painting is a colorful collaboration between cousins.

In artist Dennis Franzen's paintings, you'll find fighter jets whizzing past twin beds, military tanks rolling behind a conference table and a tyrannosaurus causing some serious roof damage.

It's hard to describe Franzen's work without sounding absurd--partly because they are designed to warp reality.

"I like to do [murals] where, when you walk into a room, it looks like you're looking outside and there's something going on out there," said Franzen, a Wilmette native.

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His work is part illusion, part decoration. Franzen designs each one using a computer and then has it printed on wallpaper, which can be customized to fit any size surface.

Franzen collaborates with McCann's Painting, a Winnetka company owned by his cousin Terry McCann. In addition to murals, the business does conventional interior and exterior paint jobs throughout the North Shore, including schools in Winnetka and Glencoe. Though Franzen's work for ad campaigns, billboards and illustrations has received nationwide recognition, he hasn't yet done a mural in Chicagoland besides the ones in his home. Franzen has spent most of his life in and around the city and he hopes to one day see his art in the neighborhoods where he grew up.

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"I used to walk from Wilmette to the train station and some of those homes along the way are old and beautiful," Franzen said. "I was thinking years ago that I would to see those homes with murals."

Before they became business partners, McCann and Franzen lived close to each other as they were growing up. Franzen moved in with McCann's family in Wilmette while he was attending school in Chicago. 

"We're pretty much brothers," Franzen said, describing the closeness of the two families.

They also share a love of boating and fishing. In fact, the idea to collaborate on murals came to them while they were enjoying their passion for water sports in Florida.

"We were just sitting one day, talking about different things, and [it sounded] like a good idea and so I said, 'OK, Den, I have a pretty good reputation. I'll start advertising and you come up with the artwork,' " McCann said. "It was just one night sitting on the boat."

That was three years ago. Since then, Franzen's murals have appeared in homes all over the country, including a group of model homes in Ohio. He has also done work for the U.S. Air Force, who took him on rides in fighter jets in exchange for his murals.

Though Franzen is a self-taught artist, he has worked as a commercial illustrator for most of his career. He has created work that has appeared in campaigns for such companies as Coca-Cola, Oldsmobile and Miller Brewing. He has produced sculptures and artwork that appear around the world. One of his paintings made a cameo in the Gene Hackman film The Package.

"I hadn't seen the movie but someone told me about it," Franzen said. "There's a poster that I did, I do some prints that are Pat Nagel style, and it says 'Friends in 88.' It's in the background when Gene Hackman walks into this room and as he's talking to another character."

Franzen has designed and made stained glass windows for clients without any experience in the medium. A sculpture of a hummingbird that stands more than 6 feet tall in Sacramento, CA, has his signature. That project, like many of his others, was a challenge Franzen accepted without much formal training.

"I never thought I could do it," he said. "But this guy called and said he loved my work, and could I make him a six-and-a-half-foot hummingbird?"

Franzen operates a studio and is part of CR ART, a studio in Chicago. Despite having business partners, he works mostly solo in filling his house with works that include some of the murals produced for McCann's Painting.

McCann said there's always a lot to admire when his family visits Franzen's home in Prospect Heights. His house is filled with his work and features some of his murals, McCann said.

"When the kids were growing up, we'd buy those big sticks of chalk for the driveway, and all of a sudden, [Franzen] would have a train running down the sidewalk," McCann said. "It was so good, I wanted to ask him, 'Can you do that again so I can frame it?' "


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