Joe Puskas: Meet the artist behind the Firehouse Subs restaurant murals

Editor's note: This story was first published in the Times-Union on Oct. 22, 2017.

The first mural for the masses that Joe Puskas painted was on the side of his father's hardware store, where he was employed.

Puskas summed up the visuals on the building in Arlington this way: "hardware graphics."

He had his own mural company by the time he painted the front of the Tom & Betty's in Lakewood in the early 1990s, and the images were considerably more ambitious.

He created a series of windows, most of which included reflections of vintage cars driving by - a nod to the restaurant's practice of naming their overstuffed sandwiches after automobiles.

The results would have a big effect on Puskas' future.

In 1994, brothers Robin and Chris Sorensen, former Jacksonville firefighters, were in the process of opening their first Firehouse Subs restaurant.

They liked what they saw outside Tom & Betty's and asked Puskas to paint for them. They suggested "bricks" on a wall inside the store on San Jose Boulevard, Puskas recalled.

"I said, 'Why not paint a mural? You don't want a guy like me, a mural artist with his own company, to paint bricks,' " he said.

The goal then became "something that was not super-expensive, but was cool."

The result: a fire engine dramatically emerging from a bay door.

The Sorensens approved.

In the 23 years since, Puskas, now chief mural artist for the Jacksonville-based Firehouse Subs franchise, has created nearly 1,100 customized murals for Firehouse Subs restaurants in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and Mexico.

He started as a one-man operation, using a wall on one side of the conference room in the company's humble first office in a shopping center.

These days, Puskas works with a staff of four artists at the spacious Firehouse Subs corporate headquarters in the Flagler Center off Old St. Augustine Road.

On any given day, canvas works-in-progress hang from the studio walls. Once completed, the firefighting-themed murals are packaged and shipped to franchisees to display at their restaurants.

An eye for art

Puskas moved with his family to Jacksonville from Cleveland about 40 years ago, when he was 15.

The unassuming Puskas said he was artistically inclined but never really studied art.

"I don't have a formal education, but I have an eyeball for art," he said, "and the eye gets better with experience."

He is grateful for an art teacher at Terry Parker High School who encouraged him to do figure drawing. The skill comes into play for every Firehouse Subs mural he does.

Puskas "wanted to keep it simple" for that first mural he created for the Sorensens.

When asked to do the second one, for a Firehouse Subs at the Beaches, "I tried to challenge myself," he said. He depicted firemen breaking through a wall to battle a blaze.

When the first restaurant moved to a nearby location on San Jose, Puskas did a canvas mural of "us building the store."

Now hanging in the training room of the corporate headquarters, it depicts multiple members of the Sorensen family - including Chris and Robin's father, Rob, a 43-year retired fire captain - all working to get the restaurant ready for business.

Puskas is shown in the righthand corner, painting the first mural. It's one of the few times he has included himself. "I think I'm in one in Arkansas," he said casually.

Several years later, when the first store relocated a second time, Puskas created a mural that was inspired by the Firehouse Subs Public Safety Foundation. The nonprofit was established in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by the Sorensen brothers, who fed first responders and survivors in Mississippi.

The mural displayed in the training room reads "March 2000 - 30 Stores and growing." The information is a reminder of how Firehouse Subs has grown since then.

The dynamic expansion changed the way Puskas went about his work. Instead of going to franchise locations to paint, he began painting on canvas. Shipping off the results took most of the traveling out of the job.

He regularly gets to the studio by about 5 a.m. - his choice. "I'm blue collar," Puskas said. "I'm a worker."

Some of his colleagues have nicknamed him Joe "Artbrush" Puskas.

Customizing the mural

All Firehouse Subs murals have two things in common: They contain fire trucks and firefighters.

Firehouse asks that trucks depicted are from the station closest to the restaurant in the community.

Beyond that, the murals are customized for the area where they are displayed, based on input from the franchisee. Typically, the photos Puskas receives include landmarks, historic fires, and mascots that sometimes play up team rivalries.

"I've done a lot of Gators and Seminoles," he said.

The standard size for a canvas wall mural is 6-by-12 feet. A hanging canvas mural - a necessity when a restaurant is constructed largely of glass and has negligible wall space - is 4-by-15 feet. Puskas works with exterior latex semi-gloss house paint.

A mural for a Firehouse Subs in Ocala is one of his favorite examples of customization, a process that aims for feel-good, even cute and warm-and-fuzzy results, Puskas said.

It features the Creature from the Black Lagoon, as well as Tarzan and Cheetah. Parts of the 1954 horror film, and several Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller, were filmed in nearby Silver Springs.

Tarzan and Cheetah, Puskas said, are putting out a fire with buckets of water.

David Crumpler: (904) 359-4164

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Firehouse Subs: Joe Puskas, the artist behind the restaurant's murals