Buildings, like autumn weather, often need a fresh coat. And if "clothing makes the man" then the same can be said of what's worn on the exterior of a business, warehouse or home.
The town of Chemainus has made outdoor paintings on the walls of their buildings into a trademark of sorts. The City of Austin made a tourist attraction out of giant-sized replicas of their town's vintage postcards. Los Angeles turned the grey concrete of an institutional viaduct and made it into a half-mile of history lessons told through art.
Prince George has sampled the possibilities of murals, but only in small doses and without concerted civic efforts. There is no public art operational directive at our city hall, and many of the most prominent painted walls in the downtown core have been unceremoniously painted over. The sad scenes of African poverty on the King's Inn bible shop, the two-storey aboriginal spectacle on the former P.G. Lock & Key building, the historic logging scene on The Croft, the urban graffiti images on the former McBike shop - all erased from the public record, replaced by blank colour. Another, a Jean-Jacques Gigure original demonstration piece, was lost (at least temporarily) to fire when the Homework store burned on Third Avenue.
There have been some prominent additions, though, especially the eye-popping Canada Winter Games image towering over Quebec Street on the wall of the post office/BID Group building, and the wild and colourful alley wall on Groop Gallery. Both of those are Milan Basic creations. Both are exposed to the same risk as the others: if the building's owners ever change their minds about the exterior decor, those works of publicly accessible art are gone.
That's a big risk painter Kathryn Rohl was willing to take. The longtime local artist wanted to do something meaningful for the city's centennial, but she didn't realize just how meaningful and risky it would be. She got stuck with a huge personal bill, but told an enormous story on the side of a downtown building.
The wall she targeted for cultural upgrading was the Dominion Street blankness of The Chinese Store. She approached the owner, Brian Chang, and he agreed to let her utilize his largest and most visible exterior facade.
"It's 14 feet high and 60 feet long. I've never done one that big by myself," said Rohl. Chang and Rohl agreed to a $2,000 payment from the store to the artist, but Rohl knew the project would cost much more than that. So worked four hours per day for 20 consecutive days. In materials alone she spent $7,000 to complete the project and grants she hoped to obtain did not come through.
Rohl offset this deficit by cobbling together other art projects. She was part of an interior mural project for AimHi, co-ordinated by the Community Arts Council. She teaches art to seniors, does art-themed birthday parties for kids, paints window displays for local businesses, and whatever illustration work she can get.
"You work hard as an artist," she said. "We have so few murals in Prince George, and as the artist, when they get painted over, it sure doesn't feel very good."
Sometimes, it isn't a business but a home that gets the artist's touch. Local homeowner Annie Gano kept seeing a couple of her neighbours working on large art projects out in the back yard. She started to imagine them doing their work on a nondescript wall of her house.
"I knew they looked across the yard and saw my big blank wall, so one day I offered it to them," said Gano. "They lived right next door - how perfect."
The neighbour thought so too. Sonny Gomez admitted he used to be part of the public art problem - a vandal tagger who would spray-paint his creations on random walls. But the idea eventually got through to him that this was someone's property and they might consider his unsolicited art to be damage or defacement. Then, he started working in reverse. He became one of the mentors of the Restart Graffiti Management Program in Vancouver, teaching art to street kids and at-risk youth, including the proper channels to go through to apply art to walls in a legal manner.
"It's a four-week program on weekends, there are five or six programs per year," Gomez said. "There are mentors like myself involved with police, city workers, counsellors, all working together to get to know the subculture aspects and boost the skills of these kids. So I've done about 30 murals, all legal art, all over Vancouver. I'm part of a production that is absolutely enormous, a whole alley."
When he isn't working for Restart, he is doing his own private paintings. He contacts the municipality involved, and the owner of the properties he wants to paint on (sometimes it is a local government and sometimes it is a private owner), gets the necessary permission, and bylaw specifications, and goes to work. Often, he will target areas that get frequently hit by the vandal kind of graffiti artist and turn a blight wall into an art wall.
He also does commissions. This summer he travelled to a set of music festivals - Tall Tree, Astral Harvest, Base Coast, Awakening, Shambala, Woof Stock - and sold his work there. In his spare time, he and art collaborator Clayton Stitt of Kimberley worked on Gano's wall on Carson Street.
"I am so happy with it. We all are," said Gano. "I'm really proud to have their work on my house. Sometimes you look at a piece of art you like and think 'I'm probably the only one who appreciates this' but nope, not this - everyone I talk to just loves what they've done. I'm so impressed. It really pops. It transformed the whole area, instead of just another forgettable residential neighbourhood. It was just a basic old house, but it doesn't look boring anymore."
"I'm born and raised here, so I love that I get to contribute art and beautification to my town," said Gomez.
Gomez and Stitt offered to do the work for free but Gano insisted an undisclosed stipend be paid them. Art is a profession and they were performing a specialized service, she said.
Rohl said she had some ideas for the wall of The Chinese Store and she also wanted Chang's input. Together they came up with something befitting the store.
"Brian expressed a wish to depict the local history of Chinese culture," Rohl said. "I did a lot of historical research at the library and the museum, and that Chinese history is particularly evident in Barkerville, but this whole region has a long connection to China as one of its first immigrant cultures that built this area. We are also the only city in the world with cutbanks. We did want to depict our First Nations as well, so that was all talked about."
Anyone wishing to contact Rohl can do so at Rohl The Stone Illustrations
([email protected]) while Gomez can be contacted on Facebook.
The Community Arts Council has a back alley art project underway, with graffiti art being painted onto wooden panels that will be installed on participating businesses' back walls. That way, if the business ever changes hands or changes its mind about having it there, the original art can be simply moved instead of painted over and lost forever.
