About Fernung Studio

Fernung Studio is the working practice of Eric Fernung, a fine-art muralist based in Indianapolis. Eric designs and paints site-specific interiors and exteriors.

Work that begins with the wall, the room, and the way light moves through both.

Eric came to mural painting through photography. Before he was painting at architectural scale, he was studying the world through a camera: rooms, people, weathered objects, landscapes, and the small unguarded moments that reveal what a place actually feels like. He studied photography in college and was pulled early toward editorial and documentary work. less interested in staged perfection than in the way a person occupies a room, the way a home tells on itself, the way light can turn an ordinary corner into a scene.

That way of seeing still sits underneath every commission. Eric looks for the hour the room is most itself, the lamp that anchors the corner, the awkward transition that needs softness, the view from a child’s height, the wall that wants to become more than a boundary. His murals are not images dropped onto a surface. They are composed for a single site, with the building’s scale, the room’s daily use, the existing materials, and the client’s life all considered before a sketch is finalized.

Eric grew up in rural Indiana. fields, woods, old houses, weathered materials, animals, seasons, and the particular stillness of the Midwest. That early landscape still shapes the work: trees, thresholds, folklore, domestic rooms, worn surfaces, and the conviction that ordinary places can hold something mythic. A wall can be practical, but it can also be symbolic. A hallway can become a passage. A room can become a world.

After years moving between photography, painting, service work, travel, and creative survival, Eric founded the studio as a way to bring those disciplines together. Fernung Studio is built from fine art, observation, craft, storytelling, and the physical labor of painting by hand — disciplined layout, surface knowledge, durable materials, and a willingness to let a room become strange, beautiful, theatrical, quiet, or alive.

eric’s range runs from theatrical hallways and trompe-l’œil interiors to nature-based rooms, decorative finishes, exterior murals, and civic-scale painted walls. Some projects are narrative and immersive: wrap-around interiors, dreamlike landscapes, symbolic forests, rooms that feel like they belong to a private mythology. Others are quieter and more material: limewash, plaster, glazed patina, faux surfaces, aged finishes. walls that change the feeling of a room without illustrating it directly. Most projects sit somewhere between the two.

Eric is interested in the place where painting, surface, architecture, and story begin to merge. A mural does not always need to announce itself. Sometimes it should feel discovered. Sometimes it should feel old, inherited, or half-remembered. Sometimes it should become the thing people gather around, photograph, talk about, or quietly live with for years.

Eric handles the design, planning, surface preparation, painting, sealing, and final wrap-up himself. On larger commissions, he brings in a trusted assistant while keeping the artistic direction and hand of the work closely held. The studio uses professional paint systems chosen for the conditions of each projec, low-VOC for occupied interiors, high-grade UV-stable systems for exterior work, and seals every project for the environment it will live in.

eric fernung is based in Indianapolis and works throughout Indiana, with select travel for residential, commercial, hospitality, public art, and destination commissions. The studio suits clients who want more than a decorative accent. clients who want a room, wall, building, or threshold to gain a lasting sense of identity.

Currently booking interior projects for winter ‘26 -’27 . Travel and public art commissions inquired about separately.