by Jess McCuan / photos by Brent Fleury

Of all the funky, colorful art objects in her home, her favorites are the butt prints. Five years ago, Mona Groban’s three children, Joey (now 32), Jamey (now 27) and Mikey (now 30) slathered their backsides in bright paint to create a triptych of tush prints on canvas, which now hang in a prominent spot in Groban’s kitchen. Later, when Joey married Amani, she dipped her derriere in paint as well to complete the diorama. The arty irreverence of the whole affair—the fact that the children would make butt prints, and that Mona would so cherish them—seems to go far toward explaining Mona Groban.

A self-taught artist and entrepreneur who worked for years as a dental hygienist, Groban paints everything she can get her hands on, from cars and cabinet doors to clothes and shoes to the insides and outsides of buildings. She almost always paints objects in bright colors—reds, greens, yellows and blues—and in her signature style: zany and surreal, with swirls or polka dots or zebra stripes thrown in to really make the colors pop. "Maybe it’s a compulsion. I don’t know," says Groban, 55, who splits her time between a studio in Downtown Hendersonville and a colorful country compound in Mill Spring, North Carolina. "Things are just prettier that way."

Pretty, yes, but not conventionally pretty. The Groban oeuvre has a bit of an edge—something she hints at when she says, "I’m not a mainstream person." (A sign in her bathroom reads: "You call me bitch like it’s a bad thing.") She’s unabashedly sassy, which can occasionally ruffle feathers. But Groban, who grew up in Cincinnati and Milwaukee and moved to the North Carolina coast in 2002, has managed to turn all that chutzpah and sass into a successful business. She sells her handmade art online, everything from $189 hand-painted purses and $239 sandals to $19 "Mona-fied" martini glasses. Driving down Davis Street in Hendersonville, you can’t miss The Cottages, three once-dilapidated buildings that Groban bought and renovated in 2007. The buildings are painted bright pastels and trimmed in zebra stripes, and in front is the jungle-themed ’66 Plymouth Fury convertible that Groban drove from Milwaukee to Carolina Beach in 2002. She lives in one building, rents out another and in the third runs an airy boutique called "Mona!" filled with shoes, clothes and saucy signs with sayings like: "May your coconuts never hang below your grass skirt."

Deck the Walls Mona Groban describes herself as a “house junkie.” In her 40s, she kept falling in love with houses, buying them, painting them up in her quintessential style and then moving on. “There’s been ten of them—maybe eleven,” she says. “A house is just like a bigger art project.”Groban has always been arty. But for years, she didn’t think of herself as an artist. Growing up, her mother’s instructions were to find and marry a nice Jewish boy but have some sort of career to fall back on. So for 22 years, Mona Groban was Mona Bernstein, working as a dental hygienist and raising three children in Milwaukee and Cedarburg, a quaint suburb. In 1996, after her marriage fell apart, her inner artist flourished. At first, she sold her painted furniture and clothing from a small studio, then to stores and galleries. Then she hawked work on the art-show circuit, traveling to some 25 shows a year. She’s also a bit of a house junkie, and for a few years in her 40s, she found herself falling in love with houses, buying them, painting them up in her quintessential style and then moving on. "There’s been ten of them—maybe eleven," she says. "A house is just like a bigger art project."

Her house in Mill Spring, which she bought in 2005, was her first experiment in country living. It’s surrounded by 600 bucolic undeveloped acres, along with parts of the Green River. There are stunning mountain views and two separate buildings, a guest cottage and a large light-filled studio. Mill Spring is a one-horse town 22 miles east of Flat Rock and somewhere north of Columbus and Beulah. Groban loves her house there, but driving ten miles to a grocery store is a pain, and the place can feel rather remote. She uses it mainly as a weekend retreat, a place to chill out with her partner Mark, a business analyst and software engineer who commutes to Atlanta during the week. In the meantime, her constant companion is Buddy, an affectionate Dachsund mutt.

Hidden in every space of Groban’s life are little signs (and sometimes big ones) inscribed with bits of wisdom: "Remember to color outside the lines"; "Life is mysterious, don’t take it serious"; "Dorothy had the shoes but lacked the vision." You get the sense that Groban, who works on art projects from the moment she gets up until the minute she goes to bed, is giving the advice to herself as much as to anyone else. It also seems clear that, even if she moved on from Mill Spring, she would figure out how to make herself happy no matter which house or wall or pair of shoes she decided to paint next. "Happiness," she scrawled in bold black letters in the window of her studio, "is not a state to arrive at but a method of traveling."

To see more of Mona Groban’s work, check out monapaints.com or call Mona! At The Cottages in Hendersonville, 828-693-1611.