What Tony Owens lacks in stature (he’s 5-5), he makes up for in presence. He has an electricity about him that can be, in a word, shocking. With his blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, bangs cutting a horizontal line across his forehead, he seems to run more like a machine than a man — chain smoking Kools, sleeping a few hours a night, and seemingly in a million places at once as both a mosaic mural artist and the owner and operator of Anthony Owens Remodeling and Repair.

But despite the faded blue-green tattoos dotting his arms and neck, despite his gruff disposition and what appears to be a hard exterior, he’s not all edge. A sensitivity shines through him when he’s around people — which is often. In fact, if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you know Tony Owens, or at least a version of him.

That electricity wasn’t always focused on bringing positive change to the world — or to Frederick specifically — through public art and donations to local nonprofits.

In Owens’ 61 years, he’s been arrested nine times. He’s been through rehab. He’s on his fourth wife. When he was practicing martial arts, he was a lethal black belt; no one wanted to fight him because he had so much rage, he said. His current wife, Eilene Owens, will tell you that when she met him five years ago, that spark we know now as a flashlight being shone into the dark corners of Frederick used to be something more of a torch of rage, carrying decades of anger.

“It’s energy,” Owens told me on a sticky-hot day in May, as we talked about his life and work. “Now I just try to spin it around do something good. I just redirected it into the positive world.”

I.

When Owens stood in line at the Community Action Agency a few months back, the guy at the front desk asked how he could help. “I told him, ‘I’m here to help you,’” Owens recalled.

Owens wanted to install a mural there for the down-and-out — the homeless, the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, the addicts and anyone else.

“I wanted to do it because these people matter,” Owens said, which is a recurring theme to his work and life. “The people who come in here matter. I just want people to know someone chose that wall to put one of their favorite pieces of art on.”

“At the end of the day, I know what it’s like to be an addict,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to wake up in your car with beer spilt all over the place and realizing you pissed your pants and nobody wants to hear from you. … The message is, we’ll listen. You’re not gonna tell me a horror story that I can’t relate to.”

The Community Action Agency building, which locals know as the old train station, is used as a food bank, a soup kitchen, an emergency shelter and most recently a community health center for the uninsured.

His piece hangs in a hallway of the new medical annex, most of which he and his crew built and remodeled. Its earthen colors are subtle and muted, and in its center is a cream-colored compass. He calls it “Direction.”

II.

Owens was born in France and, as the son of a U.S. diplomat, constantly moved to new countries — Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, what is now Bangladesh. He also went to a school with children of diplomats; his second-grade class had two people in it — including him.

His sheltered, cushy life was shook up, if only internally, when as a 7-year-old he witnessed intense human suffering for the first time, much like the story of Gautama Buddha. On his way to see a Western dentist, he and his mother landed in the slums of Calcutta. “I saw human suffering on a level that is difficult to describe,” he said. This was before leper colonies were put in remote places. Leprosy was everywhere, out in the open, in Calcutta. Beggars were missing limbs and parts of their faces. “It was so horrific. When I saw that, it went into me.”

It’s not surprising, given his childhood, that Owens would develop a deep-seated sense of being the outsider, the minority — the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy in a sea of brown eyes, hair and skin. As an adult living in the states, he often identifies with minorities, he said; he often feels closer to blacks and Latinos.

Over the past four years, he began what he calls the Magical Mystery Tour, creating public art — sometimes solo, sometimes alongside Frederick artist Jack Pabis — to draw attention to specific places, and for the people, often minorities, at those places. He wanted to give them something beautiful to look at and show them that someone cared enough to hang his artwork for them. These places are the backbone of community service in Frederick — the Community Action Agency, the Housing Authority, Heartly House and the Boys and Girls Club. They are often underfunded and even neglected but used by hundreds of people daily for services across the board: for basic food and shelter, for healthcare, for protection from domestic abuse situations, for after-school programs and emergency shelters.

He worked with Pabis to create a huge mosaic mural that celebrates the life of civil rights activist Lord Nickens. Most recently, he installed his 10th mosaic, “Direction,” in the new medical annex at the Community Action Agency in May. In between, well, he calls that journey the “magical mystery tour.” And it hasn’t stopped yet.

III.

“The last four years have been like a magical mystery tour, only without the drugs and alcohol,” he told me. “It’s all on human emotion.”

Owens came to mosaics around age 50, and there was nothing magical about it at the time.

He’d been a successful contractor in Frederick under his company Anthony Owens Construction when he fell off a roof, resulting in a concussion, hundreds of stitches in his head, double-vision, a shattered pelvic bone, a dislocated shoulder, the list goes on. The pain became chronic and a year or so later, Owens found himself facing an addiction to 11 different pharmaceuticals, all of which were prescribed to him, he said, and a drinking problem — anything (or everything) to cut the pain.

When he finally gave up drinking and drugs, after a few tries, he was looking for a hobby as a means for dealing with the physical pain, and so he ordered some mosaic pieces from the internet. He tried slinging his creations (mosaic jewelry boxes, plant stands, tables) at regional craft fairs for a few years, but as he started up another construction business, they basically fell by the wayside.

It wasn’t until he was in the emotional throes his third divorce that his son, Evan Owens, pointed out a neglected pile of mosaic materials in the yard and asked, “What about these?”

“The next day, Personality 17 came out, and I made a zillion things,” Owens recalled. He blasted Jimi Hendrix and worked on mosaic after mosaic, as if in some kind of hypnotic art frenzy.

This is typical of his creative process. It’s volcanic. Frederick Community Action Agency director Mike Spurrier laughed as he told the story of Owens pitching a mural in the new medical wing; that night (technically the wee hours of the morning), Owens had already started working on it and sent emails of the progress. “He’s probably the fastest artist I’ve ever seen,” his wife said. “If he gets a project, that’s what he does. All his energy goes into that.”

That Owens created his first large-scale public art mosaic in downtown Frederick is fate, if you will. He had no intention to ever create something like that. Kevin Lollar, executive director of the Housing Authority of the City of Frederick, had given him a construction job preparing the long brick wall that runs along Lord Nickens Street for a mural. This entailed scraping it, priming it and painting a huge white square on it which would act as a canvas for the artist. When the job was complete, Owens gave Lollar a small mosaic mirror as a gift, and upon seeing it, Lollar asked if Owens could do something like that large scale. Owens decided to give it a go and was commissioned by the Housing Authority to create with Pabis what became the “North of Fourth” Mural Project. The mural depicts a sun and moon and, between them, a man with the likeness of Owens, standing on a ladder, in the trompe l’oeil style Pabis often uses in his murals.

IV.

Let us be clear about one thing: Owens literally cringes when he’s called an artist. Sure, he’ll spend long nights working on murals and public art, usually with no compensation, and he’ll try his hand at acting (catch him in Tim Scott’s film “Spaceman Wilson,” which also stars his son), but generally speaking, he doesn’t relate to artists, he said, and he prefers it if you don’t refer to him as one. He’s using art as a means to reach people, but it’s more of a means to an end.

“I’m a blue collar. I work with my hands,” he said. “I don’t believe artists see life any differently than anyone else sees it.”

When I mistakingly asked if he has a studio where he constructs his large pieces, he practically scowled and then told me he typically works from his living room.

After he and Pabis completed “North of Fourth,” it was as if a new world opened up to Owens, the beginnings of the magical mystery tour. He has since donated murals to the Maryland Ensemble Theatre, the Banner School, Heartly House, the Boys & Girls Club and the Frederick Community Action Agency, often involving the people at each place in the creation of the work. Five of the 10 murals he’s created over the past year have been with the help of Pabis, who seems to be in many ways Owens’ opposite — tall, soft-spoken and mild-mannered, shying away from the limelight.

Paris, a longtime artist who has lived in Frederick for the past 15 years, designs the murals, though he will conceptualize them together with Owens. After outlining the basic shapes, Pabis hands it over to Owens who adds the mosaic portion in beige tile.

“He adds a really interesting kind of movement to it that kind of flows,” Pabis noted of Owens’ mosaic work.

From there, the men, with the help of some others (usually Anthony Owens Remodeling and Repair employees), install the work, and Owens adds more tile if needed to fill in gaps. Pabis completes the pieces by painting them to add color, and sometimes painting trompe l’oeil figures.

“Tony is … just very motivating,” Pabis said. “We feel excited about all our projects. Where I’m thinking, ‘this is a job, we gotta make it look good,’ he’s thinking of all these ideas and getting excited about it.”

Together they created one small piece, “Emerald City,” which shows Frederick’s skyline and hangs inside the Housing Authority of the City of Frederick offices, and four large-scale murals: after “North of Fourth” came one installed at the former Cultural Arts Center, another depicting an abstract of the Potomac River, mounted on the side of a building in Brunswick, and probably most profoundly, the Lord Nickens memorial mural in downtown Frederick, which runs along the side of the Bernard W. Brown Community Center.

V.

Lord Nickens moved to Frederick as a boy and became a lifelong civil rights activist, leading the local NAACP branch for about 20 years. People refer to him as the “Martin Luther King of Frederick.” After he died in 2013, Lollar, through the Housing Authority, commissioned Owens and Pabis to create another mural to honor Nickens’ life.

“It was an opportunity to recognize a very important person in this community,” said Lollar, who had become good friends with Nickens and looked up to him as a mentor. “I knew they were the right people to do this.”

Pabis used photographs of Nickens from different periods of his life to assimilate his essence into one eight-foot-tall Lord Nickens face. Large, mosaic silhouettes of birds fly through him and past him, across the red brick of the Bernard Brown Center.

A couple hundred people gathered for the unveiling. Many said they simultaneously felt like they were a part of something much bigger than them but also a closeness to their community.

Nickens’ wife, Thelma Nickens, who died shortly after, was in attendance, along with their children and relatives from the region. Angela Spencer, a local vocalist and music director, organized a gospel choir to sing. Sen. Ron Young, who was a dear friend of Nickens’, got in front of the crowd and spoke. Anthony Owens Remodeling and Repair crew members who had helped with the piece were there (and at one point, dancing on the roof) — among them, Owens’ son, Evan, who has gone to all of his father’s mural unveilings, he said.

“He’s completely silent at unveilings,” Evan said of his father. “I think it’s an emotional thing for him.”

“You have to have very thick skin to be a public artist,” Tony told me, and then went on to say, “I don’t care if people don’t like [the artwork]. I have to make positive change. … I do believe in karmic balance. I don’t believe in God in the traditional sense, but I believe in the spiritual interconnectedness of it all.” He paused, then added with a laugh, “I think I’m about even.”

Originally published August 2016 in The Frederick News-Post.