“I once heard Quincy Jones tell an interviewer when he had an idea, he got it down as fast he could,” architect Jerome Gray says, opening a palm-sized watercolor set across the street from The 501, a midcentury modern apartment building on the edge of Seton Hill. “If it was 3 a.m. and he needed the best bass player in LA, he’d bring him to the studio tired, drunk, hungover, whatever. Better if they were tired because they wouldn’t overthink anything. You’re just capturing the essence.”

With that, Gray counts The 501’s front-facing windows and dashes off the frame of the building in a few pencil strokes. He immediately begins adding color—the pale blue sky absorbed in the building’s white facade, the midday sun reflected in its glass, its rust-orange accents. He chats through the entire exercise, which lasts just minutes. Then he walks to the corner, takes in the new perspective, and does it again, this time without an outline, only watercolor.

In a previous iteration, The 501 was owned by The Hardest Working Man in Show Business and named the James Brown Motor Inn. Opened in 1964, it mostly served a white business crowd before Brown purchased it for $5,000,000 in 1970. An FBI raid and developing “reputation for rowdiness” at the inn’s nightclub soon forced Brown to sell.

As Gray notes on his popular Instagram feed, where he posts brief histories alongside his watercolors, The 501 was designed by Baltimorean David Harrison, who also did Dolfield Plaza and Brooklyn’s Patapsco Theatre, which today has been repurposed into a church.

Over ensuing lunch breaks, Gray returns to Seton Hill, capturing the former home of a candy company and a furniture store owned by a man who also operated an illegal saloon during Prohibition. Many of his subjects are familiar—Camden Yards, the city’s gothic cathedrals, the American Visionary Art Museum, and the Art Deco Senator Theatre (pictured above), designed by John Jacob Zink, who studied at the Maryland Institute and did the iconic Patterson Theater as well. Everything is fair game and the watercolors that get the most engagement are often the fading, occasionally vacant wonders most of us pass by without noticing, including the 1870-built Home of the Friendless building on Druid Hill Avenue.

Since 2016, Gray has posted 3,300 sketches. “I’d gone into business for myself and it wasn’t ‘going’ yet, and my wife told me I needed to get out of the house,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Didn’t you used to draw?’”

Most of his works depict Baltimore’s built environment, although there are sketches of D.C., Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland—“a city with great architecture”—and Detroit, his hometown. Emulating an older brother who drew, Gray got good with a pencil at a young age and excelled in the architecture program at Detroit’s legendary Cass Technical High School, whose notable alumni include John DeLorean and Diana Ross.

“I was in a good-size class of Black kids, if you can imagine this in the 1970s and 1980s, who were put through the wringer,” he says. “My best friends were in the program, and we were all going be architects. Lo and behold, three of us became architects. The fourth one became an engineer.”

Completely unplanned, his watercolors garnered attention from local architects, historians, and preservationists and became a career boon, leading to exhibitions and commissions. Gray gave the keynote address for the 2019 Doors Open weekend sponsored by the American Institute of Architects-Baltimore and joined the Baltimore City Historical Society board. He now regularly presents on urban architecture and history.

Are there buildings he wants to get to? “Always,” he says, naming WEBB’s old radio studio, which James Brown also owned, in West Baltimore’s Fairmount neighborhood. He also wants to check out the views from Johnston Square on the east side.

“The one I want to do, but can’t, is the Mechanic Theatre, which was demolished. There are good reasons to knock down buildings, but there was no reason to demolish the Mechanic. It was designed by an important American modernist architect, John Johansen, whose work in other places is celebrated. The Mechanic was an amazing exercise in broken-form concrete. It was this complex, broad-shouldered, tough building that was honest to what it was—a concrete building. It was corrupted over its time, but it should’ve been loved. Instead, we still have a big hole in the middle of the city eight years later.”

(Gray warns not to get him started about McKeldin Fountain, another brutalist landmark demolished with support from the Downtown Partnership.)

“One of the significant things about modernism, which is about the only architecture movement people don’t seem to like, is brutalism,” Gray explains. “You may not like it, but it played with form and depth and shadow and light better than just about anything. I think what people like [in my sketches] is the color and the contrasts, but that’s the thing, the architect’s vision, I’m trying to communicate.”

Working mom Jennifer Nolley loved to paint when she was growing up, and she wanted art and creativity to be part of her children’s lives, as well. But the logistics of it all—finding the right supplies, getting prepared, cleaning up—were both challenging and stress-inducing. They took a lot of the fun out of it.

Unhappy with products already on the market, Nolley came up with a solution. She started Tiny Easel, a company that provides art in a box for budding artists—and the busy parents who want to encourage them. The goal, she says, is to make art fun and approachable for children, without being stressful for anyone else.

“I wanted activities that would hold their interest,” Nolley says. “Things that they could enjoy and that I could enjoy without hovering or worrying about the mess.”

Nolley, 37, launched the company this month, both online and with a pop-up shop at Whitehall Mill in Hampden. Its motto is: “For little hands with big ideas.”

Tiny Easel sells art activity kits that contain everything families need to make watercolor paintings, drawings, and sketches. (Think 36-color palettes, brushes, sponges, spill-proof cups, coloring pages, activity guides, and, of course, a tiny easel.) All they need to add is water.

Nolley said she chose watercolors over acrylics because they’re easy to work with and clean up. She added watercolor crayons and pencils to give a variety of mediums.

“Watercolors are amazing for kids,” she said. “They’re washable and non-toxic. Acrylics can dry out, but watercolors last forever.”

Watercolor painting also reminds her of her childhood: “One of the things I remember as a child is doing watercolors with my mom when we would go on vacation,” she says. “She would bring a little set of watercolors and we would paint together.”

That led to other arts-related interests.

“I have always been taking art classes at MICA on the weekends,” she says. “I went to film school. Everything I’ve done has been art-based. I wanted to be a film production designer for years, working on sets. I did en plein air classes. I think everything in my life just keeps coming back to that moment with my mom doing watercolors.”

This is the first retail venture for Nolley, a Baltimore native who graduated from Friends School and got a masters degree in interior architecture from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C.

She started Tiny Easel in addition to her full time job as Developer and Designer for Terra Nova Ventures, a real estate company that was started by her father, David Tufaro, and specializes in the adaptive reuse of historic buildings, including Whitehall Mill and Mill No. 1 in the Jones Falls Valley.

She’s married to Dawson Nolley, a real estate agent with Cummings & Co. Realtors. They live in Ruxton and are raising three children: Elizabeth, 7, Kathryn, 4 and George, 1. She volunteers at Riderwood Elementary School in its Smart Art program, which introduces kindergarteners and first graders to art.

Nolley said she’s had the idea for Tiny Easel for some time, but really started working on it while on maternity leave with her third child last summer. She spent more time developing it while the family was in quarantine during the pandemic. “Being stuck inside with the kids was helpful,” she says, “because it gave us time to try out more things.”

Many of the line drawings in the coloring books grew out of trips she and her children took to the National Aquarium, the Maryland Zoo, and Cylburn Arboretum.

“I’ve been going around Lake Roland a lot during the quarantine, so a lot is also inspired by nature,” she says, flipping through the watercolor book. “This drawing is inspired by my daughter, who always wants more sprinkles on her ice cream. This is inspired by Hilton Carter. He’s a big plant guy. This is a still life. This is a drawing that I created to teach my kids than when you overlap colors, you can get new colors. Jumping in puddles is a big thing for my kids.”

Even the rocket ship on the box, she said, is “inspired by the Maryland Science Center and elements of outer space.”

The target audience for Tiny Easel is children aged 3 to 10, although there’s nothing to prevent older children and adults from buying the boxes, too. The instructions are general enough that users can go in any number of directions. And while Nolley doesn’t promise that Tiny Easel will turn every kid into the next Picasso, she says the idea is simply to introduce kids to painting and let them take it from there.

“My hope is that kids just enjoy painting at an early age and take that into whatever aspect of life they want to,” she says. “Maybe it’s becoming an architect or an interior designer or a graphic designer. Maybe it’s not even specific to design. My hope is that they develop some creative skills from what they’ve learned at an early age, and have fun with it.”

Earlier this month, the Nolleys celebrated Tiny Easel’s debut by turning a merchant space at Whitehall Mill into a pop-up shop for the day.

Andrea Griffin, a real estate agent, bought six Tiny Easel Painter Boxes as gifts for clients and friends. Rachel Tranter bought a box to use herself. Lauren Prendeville said she bought two travel kits for her daughter, Madison, because they were going on a car trip.

Prendeville said she likes Tiny Easel because the paints are watercolor, and that’s different from the usual acrylic or tempera paints.

“It’s something that parents don’t even think of,” Prendeville said. “We buy chunky Crayola paint because we think that’s all kids can handle. This actually teaches them watercolor, which is a more sophisticated form of art.”

Nolley plans to eventually sell each item in the kit separately, so it’s easy to get refills. She said most of the sales will be online, but she’d like to do more pop-up events to spread the word.

In many ways, Nolley said, Tiny Easel represents everything she loves in life and is good at—kids, painting, drawing, design, sparking creativity. If it’s a success, she said, she’d like to devote full time to it. “That would be my dream.”