56The Butterfly That's Almost Gone
Butterfly panel painted across salvaged planks for Velvet Taco’s Waco store at 1021 S Jack Kultgen Expy, which opened in June 2023 · the VELVET TACO crest around the corner is the company’s own logo painted as signage, not a separate artwork · the butterfly’s painter is not on record · know who painted it? Tell us.MURAL
One wall shouts TACOS in a gilded frame. The other is a butterfly quietly returning to the wood it was painted on.
At the stroll's far south end, one taco shop runs two completely opposite walls. Street side: the crest — VELVET TACO in an ornate parlor-mirror frame, pink flourishes, stars, pure carnival-barker confidence on grey block. It's a logo and it knows it, and as logos go it's a good one.
But walk around the corner. The other wall is built from salvaged, sun-greyed planks, and painted across them — in teals and corals gone quiet with weather — is a huge butterfly that is slowly, gracefully losing its argument with the woodgrain. Every year the boards drink in a little more of it. Nobody retouches it. That's the beauty: one wall is an advertisement, permanent and loud; the other is a painting on borrowed time, and the borrowed time is the art. See it now, whatever year you're standing in. It has never been this faded, and it will never be this bright again.
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