Most urban dwellers have opinions about the look of their city. But North End resident Nathan Swain is putting plenty of energy – and his own cash – behind promoting an unusual beautification project.

Swain wants to add color and vibrancy to some of Boston by hanging screen-printed photography over its many blank walls. On his own, Swain – a former landscape artist whose day job is with Boston-based home energy company Next Step Living – has already completed two neighborhood-approved projects in the North End.

He emphasizes photographs of nature, specifically images from Boston’s own parks, to cover up the concrete and brick canvases of the city. But now he wants to inspire other residents, artists or not, to improve their urban spaces using this concept.

Nathan Swain

Title: Outdoor Artist

Age: 36

Experience: one and a half years

So you have two projects finished in the North End. How did you get started with this?

The first is this NStar electric substation, and it’s filled with transformers and switch gear, actually the two top floors are empty. … it’s still active, and there used to be some grating or bars in the building’s windows, but they made a lot of noise, so NStar bricked them up. I’ve lived in the North End 10 years, and I used to look at this building and think, “Why can’t this be something better?” So I had this idea of making the bricked-up windows look like real windows, and I was originally going to paint and get up on the building with scaffolding and stuff. … but then I realized the scaffolding was going to cost a ridiculous amount of money. Thankfully I was just riding by the TD Garden and I saw these banners everywhere and I thought, “I’m already doing stuff in Photoshop, why don’t I just do it all in photos?” So I just started taking photos of objects and collaging them to make windows. The window mullions I took from a building in Cambridge, the curtains I got from Bed Bath and Beyond. The cats are my friends’ cats.

The project, with the scaffolding and painting, was originally going to cost like $30,000, and I ended up doing it with printed banners [and] it got cut in half to $15,000. And I paid for the whole thing … I got some money from [the owners of] the two cats [for including them in the work]. I got $300 a cat.

Wow, people wanted to see their cats on the building that badly?

Yeah, I put the word out and not many people took me up on it, but some people did.

But the big idea is to cover up blank or ugly walls all over the city?

Yes. It’s cheap and efficient. .. you just have to have a pretty fancy camera, a high-resolution camera, and it’s as easy as ‘click.’ This was one picture, and boom, it’s done. …[to install them] I went through Boston Building Wraps, they do banners all over the city. The guy hung [like a window washer] with a drill, and just drilled into the brick and, then tapped [the printed photo] into the anchors. I also want to stress that this is not advertising. Advertisers have been using this medium for decades, years. I’m proposing to do this textless – no fonts, just images.

And you’re also proposing that this happen on a large scale, like on the giant wall of TD Garden, the side of Macy’s in Downtown Crossing or part of City Hall Plaza. That would probably be more controversial than a few less-noticeable buildings.

Yeah, I’m expecting pushback. But I want to open this idea up. Anyone can do this with a high resolution camera, and permission from the powers that be or the building’s owners.

The current trend in architecture seems to be all about being very grand-scale, with lots of metal and glass and big lines, so a back-to-nature look seems to be going directly against that.

There’s some good new architecture, but a lot of it’s kind of bad too. They try and build buildings that no one’s ever seen before, they’re always trying to amaze us and shock us, and do things like, confounding to the imagination, and I mean, the concept has some merit, but you have to live with this building for like a hundred years …It’s very un-human. They dehumanize the building, they don’t build it to a human scale.

…I want to humanize some of our spaces, naturalize some of our spaces, and try to soften some of the hard edges. Some of the stuff I’m proposing, it’s only 20 years at the most it’s going to be around. And I’m perfectly OK with that.

Top Five Background Facts About Nathan Swain:

1. Born in Worcester, his degree is in landscape architecture from UMass Amherst.

2. As a landscape architect for eight years, Swain’s experience was mostly in designing parks and athletic fields.

3. An amateur artist, Swain has been oil painting for 15 years.

4. His two screen-printing projects are an NStar building on Salem Street and a St. Leonard’s Catholic Church courtyard wall.

5. To promote his idea, Swain photographed 1,000 blank walls in Boston and hopes to publish a book, tentatively entitled “Ugly Boston.”