Wylie Caudill is in a familiar place, painting a colorful mural on a large wall in Central Kentucky.

Since breaking out earlier this decade, Caudill’s profile rose quickly with murals in downtown Lexington, the Kentucky Horse Park, Cynthiana, Paris, and other towns in the Bluegrass, and being named the official artist of the 2024 Kentucky Derby made his star even brighter. Still, the mural he is working on this Saturday afternoon is special in several ways. 

Caudill’s portrait of Lexington icon Henry Faulkner is part of the 2026 PRHBTN mural season, its  first lineup of new murals since 2021, when founders John and Jessica Winters decided to end the event after an eight-year run that brought icons like Eduardo Kobra’s Lincoln mural on the back of the Kentucky Theatre to Lexington’s landscape.

PRHBTN and Caudill missed each other in their initial efforts to paint the town. But in the revival of mural season, they’ve come together.

“Just to kind of be in this lineup with really incredible artists, artists that I’ve been following for a long time and have really respected, I think it’s just amazing to have gotten to sit among them, you know, at the artist talk, and to have a piece next to Smug’s is really cool,” Caudill says, taking a break from adding some detail to Faulkner’s green unicorn in the mural.

Lexington-based Caudill is painting a few yards down from Glasgow, Scotland-based artist Smug at 139 West Short Street, where a few PRHBTN murals already cover large swaths of wall. John Winters has wanted to bring Smug to Lexington since the beginning of PRHBTN.

“We had a great year and we did a lot,” John says, a few days after the painting for PRHBTN 2026 wrapped up. “We did a lot of things that I think we should have been doing in the past that made things a lot easier and a lot more fun. And we learned a lot of things that I think we can do for next year.”

Chief among them was expanding the leadership of the event to include Alexandrea Pangburn and Geoff Murphy to broaden the responsibilities. This allowed them to add things like an artist talk at 21c Museum Hotel, painting parties at the murals, regular social media updates, and an expanded  gallery show at the Lexington Art League’s Loudoun House Gallery.

“We did a very extreme DIY, two-man show thing for a long time, and it just doesn’t work,” Winters says. “I mean, it works, but it doesn’t work as well as having a couple extra people.

“It’s still a ton of work. But days like today and the last couple days make it worth it. Seeing people react to the pieces and the reaction online and getting to drive around and actually get a good look at them has been really awesome.”

Winters also notes that, unlike past mural seasons, all the artists were in town and working at the same time instead of spread throughout October.

“That was really good not only for us to kind of compress our work time, but also to have artists meeting other artists and bouncing things off of each other, networking and talking,” John says.  “To get them all in the same room down at 21c, which was nice enough to let us do it, and have a Q and A and to get artists different perspectives, to hear them tell their stories and their perspectives and their opinions … to get them to talk and then take questions from the audience as well I think was really one of my favorite moments of all the years.”

Just visiting the murals and artists brings a variety of perspectives on the art and form.

Taking a break from his large work featuring a brooding man in a dark environment, Smug says, “I don't like to force feed a narrative. I like the viewer to come up with their own conclusions.”

Meanwhile, Los Angeles-based Kiptoe reflected on the process that resulted in his piece on the side of Bicycle Face at the corner of Elm Tree Lane and Short Street.

“I landed on this kind of spiritual coming-back-to-self, where I could have the centerpiece in the middle, and then the other elements flanking out on either side, creating a draw towards the middle, and you can see it from across the road here, and it really brings your eye and makes you curious to come closer to inspect it and see what’s going on,” he says.

Kiptoe says the building’s long, thin wall, interrupted by steps and a window, was a challenge to paint, but he appreciates the visibility of the wall and the buffer a lawn provides between the mural and the road.