Lawns, sand, snow and laterite soil. Over the past fifteen years, Saype, the artist born Guillaume Legros, has covered all four with monumental murals, many of them temporary murals on grass. His paint is 100 percent biodegradable, and the works are built to fade.
Now 37, the Franco-Swiss artist is a former nurse and one of the most visible names in contemporary land art. He sees his practice as something without precedent. “In the history of art, I haven’t found anyone who has produced what I do. I’ve looked,” he says with a laugh. “Of course, the Lascaux caves come to mind, but it’s not the same scale or the same logic.”
His site-specific temporary murals on grass range from 1,000 to 18,000 square meters. Wind, rain, erosion and regrowing vegetation take them apart over time. Drone photography preserves them. Saype has said his aim from the start is “to influence mindsets without harming nature.”
Saype’s works are built to fade into the landscape, and a similar bond between art and living terrain appears in Straw Walls Ecosystem at Extremadura Open-Air Artwork, where the installation itself becomes part of the ecosystem it sits in.
A nurse who wanted to be an artist
He discovered street art and the paintings of Claude Monet and J.M.W. Turner at age 14. “It really resonated with me right away, and I started painting on canvas,” he recalls. At 18, he told his mother he wanted to become an artist. Her answer was blunt: find a real job.
That job, as a nurse, gave him something he later valued. “It served me well to have responsibilities and lead a team,” he says. “I didn’t need to worry about making money or selling things to pursue art. That gave me greater creative freedom to do what I wanted.”
He spent ten years studying environmental science, and his work in healthcare put him in daily contact with mortality. Those experiences led him to a question he could not shake: what mark would he leave behind? The answer started to take shape in 2012, when he was 23. He had a strategic reason for pursuing it. “I realized that if I want to make a living from my art and become an artist, I have to be well-known. To achieve that, I have to invent something, otherwise it becomes difficult to stand out from the crowd. That’s why I wanted to create my own biodegradable paint.”
Saype read books on traditional recipes and watched dozens of documentaries. He tested roughly fifty pigments. The paint had to be opaque enough to show on grass, durable enough to survive rain, wind or snow, and stable under ordinary conditions. “I had to figure out how to orient myself in the space and spray my natural pigments onto the ground using industrial compressors,” he says.
From first mural to international career
His first work, “L’Amour,” covered 1,600 square meters in the French Alps in 2015. It showed a woman’s torso in a style that blends hyperrealism with Impressionism. Press coverage arrived almost at once. The following year, he left his job in public health to paint full time, spending three years refining his technique.
The formula changes with each site. Depending on location and weather, he says there are “a thousand different recipes.” The core ingredients usually include charcoal, chalk and casein, a milk protein that binds the pigment. He also uses materials he finds on site.
He now works with a four-person team. Two production assistants, childhood friends who have worked with him since his first piece, handle the physical labor. A manager helps with strategic decisions, and a project manager runs the back office.
Each of these temporary murals on grass takes about two years to prepare, four or five days to execute and one to two weeks to fade. The hardest job in his portfolio was a 6,000-square-meter design in Brazil, which he scaled down to 1,500 square meters. Severe weather forced him to repaint it three times. The project is part of “Beyond Walls,” a series launched in 2019 that imagines the world’s largest human chain of intertwined hands. The project in Brazil tops the list of the series’ difficult moments. Saype describes it in his own words:
“I had just finished the piece in Benin, the departure point for slaves heading to Brazil or the Caribbean. I wanted to symbolically build this bridge in Copacabana. I had two parties to convince: UNESCO and the mayor of Rio de Janeiro. After a year of discussions, I was granted five days. It was complicated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The forecast called for perfect weather, but it poured, and I had to start all over again after two days that had already been physically grueling. This triggered a domino effect, because I had three stages planned in Brazil and hadn’t accounted for enough pigments. I saw my project falling apart. In the end, I divided the surface area into four parts, which allowed me to complete the mural in a single day and have enough pigments left for the other two destinations.”
Planning temporary murals on grass from the air
Drone footage carries these works to a global audience. Before any paint goes down, Saype spends hours on Google Earth mapping each design digitally. On his first drone flight over a site, he studies the terrain and tests sightlines to find the best position. From the air, he sets elevation, records GPS coordinates and places ground markers.
He also builds an anamorphosis, a distorted drawing that only reads correctly from one viewing point. “This technique allows me to distort the perspective and establish a viewing angle,” he explains. “To set it up, I need to understand how the vanishing lines are positioned on the ground. I create a large square where I place stakes every fifteen meters, which gives me the proportions of the site.”
The grid lets him adjust a sketch to uneven ground. He plans the pigment quantities in advance and allows a 50 percent margin of error. Light matters just as much. “If I shoot against the light, the mural won’t stand out the same way,” he says. “If the child in the drawing is looking at the horizon, I’ll be more likely to choose a sunset.”
For photography, he flies a 4 kg DJI Inspire 2 with a 16 mm lens. An assistant handles the controls while he frames each shot. He started in the 2010s with a DJI Phantom 1 and a GoPro taped underneath. There was no live video feed then. “I’d take burst shots because we couldn’t see the results,” he recalls. He uses AI only for site research and administrative work.
Equipment and paint together cost about 50,000 euros per project. He jokes that ten compressors at 10,000 euros each come on top of that. His work falls into two groups: self-funded personal projects and commissions from partners. He holds a six-year contract with Villars-sur-Ollon, a Swiss ski resort at 1,300 meters overlooking Lake Geneva. “Half the people who go there come to see my murals,” he says. “I usually have free rein.”
“Beyond Walls” is self-funded, as is his 10,000-square-meter water lily piece on a lawn in Giverny, France. That work marked the centenary of Monet’s death. He also made a design for Handicap International in Gurten Park, Switzerland, to mark 30 years of humanitarian work.
This year, Saype made his first film project. Working with Paramount, he painted a 2,000-square-meter mural in the pastures of Beaufortain, in Savoie, France. It shows a human hand reaching toward a dog’s paw. The image appears in David Ayer’s “Heart of the Beast,” starring Brad Pitt. “I met the director of Paramount at one of my exhibitions,” Saype says. “I worked on a theme broader than the screenplay: man and animal, man and the living world.”
After each site-specific work, he sells signed and numbered prints on matte fine art paper, in sizes of 40×60 cm and 120×80 cm, through his website. He also makes one-of-a-kind physical pieces for galleries and museums. Before painting, he places a 50 by 50 centimeter sheet of paper where the mural will go. He removes these sheets before the final photographs. “It’s the only physical trace left behind, created by nature, the elements, and the climate,” he says. He has used this process since 2023. He calls the fragments “pixels,” and collectors buy them.
Beyond Walls comes to America
Saype is now focused on the United States. He has just finished a project in San Francisco. It is his second U.S. mural after Minneapolis, and his 23rd worldwide. His earlier stops include Paris, Berlin, Cape Town, Belfast, Fuji, Montreal and Yamoussoukro. The Yamoussoukro piece, at 18,000 square meters, is his largest to date.
He says the choice of Minneapolis was deliberate. “It’s no coincidence that I started with Minneapolis. In 2022, George Floyd was murdered, and that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.” He ties his San Francisco work to a second wave of unrest, citing two killings of American citizens by ICE agents in January 2026. He also points to the city’s role in debates over artificial intelligence. “In my view, San Francisco is at the center of the storm when it comes to AI issues,” he says. He cites the claim that AI has a more than 10 percent chance of destroying humanity in the coming decade. He presents this as his own reading of the debate, not as an established finding.
From 2027 to 2030, he plans an American chapter of “Beyond Walls.” He is targeting about a dozen cities, including Chicago, Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis and Miami. The plan calls for twelve stops over three years, starting with two or three murals in 2027. His next confirmed stop is Montgomery, Alabama, where he wants to address civil rights. “The spot I’ve chosen that best showcases my artwork is in front of the State Capitol, whose park measures 100 meters by 50,” he says.
If Saype’s American tour interests you, James Reka’s Vivid Abstract Murals Worldwide offers another look at large-scale painting reshaping cities across several continents.
Art that asks for patience
Saype describes his outlook on the future as both worried and hopeful. Children appear again and again in his murals, and he treats them as a sign of a kinder world. “I feel a sense of mission in my work because I have an artistic voice that carries weight in terms of visual impact on society,” he says. “I always try to frame my messages in a positive light, even when addressing fundamental issues that remain complex. I think it’s harder to create beauty, nuance and poetry than to make provocative art that forces people to question.”
Still, he expects land art to keep pace with a changing world. “Land artists will have plenty to say and share about this ever-changing landscape,” he says. Each mural takes one to two weeks to fade. The drone images are what remain.
Source: petapixel.com
Frequently asked questions
What is Saype’s temporary mural paint made of?
Saype’s paint is 100 percent biodegradable. The core ingredients usually include charcoal, chalk and casein, a milk protein that binds the pigment, and he also uses materials he finds on site.
How long do Saype’s temporary murals on grass last?
Each mural takes four or five days to execute and one to two weeks to fade. Wind, rain, erosion and regrowing vegetation break them down over time.
How large are Saype’s temporary murals on grass?
His site-specific temporary murals on grass range from 1,000 to 18,000 square meters.
How are Saype’s murals preserved after they fade away?
Drone photography preserves the murals after natural forces like wind, rain and erosion have taken them apart.
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