Inside the Bee Mural: Artist talks about his inspiration

Downtown Hendersonville visitors the last few weeks have likely witnessed progress on the Bee Mural Project, featuring the vibrant and symbolic artwork of bees and honey comb.

Muralist Matt Willey is the man behind the brush. He is beautifully and carefully hand-painting bees on the exterior walls at Hands On! Children’s Museum, the side facing the Azalea parking lot.

Willey, who has brought to life around 30 murals, makes sure each project is done at its own pace. Hendersonville’s mural was years in the making, and initially off to a slow start due to the remnants of one of this season’s hurricanes drenching Western North Carolina.

The weather doesn’t get Willey down, though, as he’s learned over the years to take the experience as it comes.

“I sort of gave up stressing out about that stuff a long time ago,” Willey said in an interview earlier this month, referring to the weather forecast. The past week or more has provided dry and sunny days, allowing Willey to spend more time up on the lift to work.

Each community helps inspire Willey’s creations. He lived in Asheville up until recently, which gave him a personal familiarity with Hendersonville. The artwork comes together organically as Willey progresses.

“I figure it out as I go,” he said. “It is whatever inspires me.”

Willey is not only an artist, but an activist and environmentalist. His work aims to spread knowledge about the pollination process and spark deeper thought and conversation.

“The symbolism of the bee to the hive is a symbol to me that we are not separate from each other,” Willey said. “…The queen understands she is 100% connected to that hive. We have a hard time getting that through our minds. We are exactly the same way.”

He founded The Good Hive as a personal commitment to hand-paint 50,000 honey bees around the world. After a personal experience with a honey bee in 2008, Willey realized that human health is like the honey bee which depends on the health of the hive, not the individual bee.

“If COVID-19 has taught us anything it is that we are truly all connected more deeply than we realize,” according to The Good Hive website, adding that the global hive Willey paints is a metaphor for the connectedness of all things. The bees are a symbol for humans, trees, animals, pollinators, water, soil and everything in between.

In Hendersonville, Willey has been inspired by the children’s museum that has been his canvas. Leadership at Hands On! agrees that the mural will create inspiration throughout Hendersonville.

The project will help extend the children’s museum’s mission to inspire creativity through STEAM to the entire community, Executive Director Joseph Knight has said.

Painting isn’t the only task on Willey’s plate. He balances different interviews, including podcasts, during his work days. He helped explain his project to local students as part of a filmed field trip examining topics like the jobs of each bee.

At each of Willey’s murals, onlookers often pause to check on his progress. Typically the further along the mural is, the larger the audience.

Willey will paint for another week and a half, wrapping up by Dec. 2, according to Bee City USA – Hendersonville. By this time, the hive portion of the mural at the end of the long wall should be all or mostly completed.

The bees will then “overwinter” and the rest of the hive, to be located around the corner of the building, will be painted in the spring. When Willey returns to finish up the project, the flowers and other pollinators will also be painted.

The mural is the result of around two years of organizing the mural, which includes over 50 sponsors. Bee-mural enthusiasts say it will point to the important agricultural businesses and the farm-to-table movement in Henderson County that acknowledges the importance of honey bees and other pollinators in the community’s economy and heritage.

The Bee Mural will be listed on the Appalachian Mural Trail along with five other murals on or around Main Street. The work of art is expected to inspire more pollinator-friendly plantings, like the five-acre wildflower meadow along the Oklawaha Greenway in Hendersonville.

For more information on Willey and The Good of the Hive, go to www.thegoodofthehive.com/about.