Spray-paint artist traces spirit of creativity to childhood in Glassport

Jeremy Raymer has paid tribute to Pittsburgh legends throughout the city.

By JENNIFER MCCALLA
McKeesport Community Newsroom

Before his larger-than-life, spray-painted murals took over the brick walls of Pittsburgh, Jeremy Raymer was just a kid enjoying his freedom playing in the alleys of his native Glassport.

He and his friends spent hot Mon Valley summers making toothpick boats to race down storm gutters, trying to catch an anole lizard that had escaped onto the back porch and smashing old batteries with rocks in an alley just to watch the acid pop out. On more daring afternoons when he was in high school, they would jump off the roof of the local American Legion building directly into a backyard swimming pool.

Artist Jeremy Raymer is shown with his recent mural, Self Portrait X Jane Doe, in Braddock. Photograph by Jennifer McCalla/McKeesport Community Newsroom

“We’re lucky we didn’t die,” Raymer says, standing on the concrete steps of his childhood home on Ninth Street. His neatly cropped brown hair, signature mustache and relaxed smile reflect a man at ease revisiting the neighborhood that shaped him.

Art wasn’t even a passing thought to him as a boy. In fact, when he was coaxed into it by South Allegheny High School art teacher Lynn Cherney, his creative output was entirely fueled by an intense obsession with “The Simpsons.”

Much to his teacher’s chagrin, he sneaked Homer Simpson into virtually every assignment until he was outright banned from drawing him. Yet, he got the last laugh; he still holds onto ceramics he made in the late 1990s stamped with Homer’s face.

Cherney still remembers the day the quiet new kid walked into her classroom midway through the school year.

“I knew the family, and I was so happy because it’s a great family and he’s a great kid,” she recalls. “He was very talented.”

He was creative, but back then, he figured his future lay in something highly structured — architecture or maybe orthopedic surgery.

He fondly recalls swimming daily with his sister and his friends at the Glassport Pool just two blocks from his house, along with trips for hoagies and penny candy at Fuzzy’s, and watching the firemen’s parades and fireworks at the mid-August Feast of the Assumption.

Today, the 45-year-old has more than 100 murals covering roughly 150,000 square feet across Western Pennsylvania. His portfolio includes Pirates great Roberto Clemente on the North Side, Hall of Fame catcher Josh Gibson in Homestead, Pittsburgh rapper FRZY in Braddock, horror effects legend Tom Savini in Bloomfield and a sasquatch in the North Side’s Deutschtown neighborhood.

Now, 10 years after leaving a stable engineering career at Westinghouse Electric Co. to paint full-time, he has made another unexpected move: returning to engineering. The decision wasn’t a retreat from art but a way to reclaim it. He hopes to spend less time painting “other people’s visions” and more time creating the bold, personal work that first drew him to public walls.

To understand his murals, you have to understand his brain. He spent seven years at the University of Pittsburgh studying biomechanical and electrical engineering. Before that, his dad, a union carpenter who also restored and sold antiques, built him a small workbench where young Jeremy would obsessively tear apart old speakers and electronics just to extract the magnets. That clinical, analytical mindset never left him.

“Math always made sense to me,” he says, “But you know, I never took artwork seriously. I enjoyed it. You know, I like to make things. I like to work with my hands.”

Where other artists look at a massive, multi-story downtown wall and see an intimidating psychological barrier, he sees a data problem to be solved step-by-step.

“That’s what my schooling was,” he said. “For me, it’s just knowing that I’m making a little bit of progress each day. Now, every stroke of mine is intentional. The spray paint feels like an extension of my being.”

His current process bridges sci-fi tech with street grit. To achieve perfect spatial scale on massive walls, he uses a Meta Quest virtual reality headset to project and augment his digital Photoshop designs directly onto the brick before sketching the outline.

Raymer’s connection to the Mon Valley runs deep. In high school, he and his friends ran a lawn-care business called “The Mow Men,” cutting grass throughout McKeesport. He spent afternoons pulling microfiche and researching science fair projects at the McKeesport Library and learned to swim at the YMCA.

His first taste of large-scale painting came in South Allegheny’s weight room, where he and classmates painted a giant gladiator using Arnold Schwarzenegger as a reference. Raymer graduated in 1999.

He first painted publicly near San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during five years he spent in California. When he returned to Pittsburgh in 2010, the traditional art world showed little interest.

“I took my oil portraits around to galleries in Regent Square, the West End and Shadyside,” he recalls. “All of them told me they couldn’t sell my artwork. They said I’d never make it.”

Rather than wait for approval, he took his work directly to the streets.

He taught himself how to handle a spray can via a single YouTube video. “I was using the wrong caps for the first like two years,” he admits.

Going from oil portraits to bringing his work to public walls naturally brought him into direct conflict with Pittsburgh’s protective graffiti subculture. Because he didn’t come up through the traditional graffiti ranks, his murals rubbed some local taggers the wrong way.

“I’ve been threatened to get my (expletive) beat like 40 times at least over the years,” he reveals with a grin. “They take it very seriously. I always told them where I was at. They never showed up.

“Virtually everything I do at some point will be gone. There’s definitely an ephemeral component to it. It’s kind of like an exercise in futility putting a lot of time and energy into something I know will fade away, but sometimes the memory lasts.”

His true passion lies in pop culture and local horror iconography. “Most people don’t want me to paint nightmare-inducing murals, which is exactly what I would like to do.”

Future projects include a self-funded George Romero film montage mural in Braddock, a Batman piece and a custom graphic apparel line.

Ironically, the artist who has logged more than 40,000 hours painting Western Pennsylvania has never painted a mural in his hometown.

“This mural here isn’t mine,” he said, pointing down the street. “I’ve never done a mural in Glassport. It’s on the list.”

His cousin, Chris Galiyas, who is a West Mifflin art teacher, describes him as “a very smart, very educated artist. … You can tell he puts a lot of thought into everything he does.”

He adds that “Jeremy has a very unique style. You can tell it’s Jeremy’s work from a mile away.”

Raymer’s art teacher, Lynn Cherney, has continued following his career since those high school days and said, “His work is just terrific.”

He keeps a low profile and lets his murals speak for themselves.

For now, he continues adding to Pittsburgh’s visual landscape while balancing life between engineering and art. But whether he’s wearing a Westinghouse badge or standing in a lift with a spray can in hand, the foundation remains the same.

He is still the kid from Ninth Street, determined, creative and willing to take risks.

To track Raymer’s latest public art installations follow him at: https://www.facebook.com/jeremymraymer/ or https://www.instagram.com/raymerpgh.