Prince Rupert has a lot of ugly walls in its downtown core. The contractors in this city seem to have gone through a phase where cinder block construction and metal siding on every surface was de rigueur. The nice thing about cinderblock walls though is that they are nice to paint, and we own a commercial building on the main street that had a small back deck with a perfect mural wall facing it. The wall belonged to our neighbour’s building, however, so we reached out to them with the idea for a mural. They were fortunately on board, and kindly signed all the paperwork that City Hall required, which took several months to work its way through the system, which meant we missed out on a few weather windows where the project could have been completed. There were development permits required, the mural design had to be approved, the owners of the building had to be verified (because I wasn’t painting my own building), and once the bulk of the painting was completed, the building inspector actually had to come by and sign off on the completion of the permit. We hired a young talented artist, Nick John, to design and paint the bulk of the mural, and part of his brief was of course to include the public in some manner. He tied in part of the painting on one particular sunny Saturday with an alternative art show that was going on in a nearby store on the other side of us. We had kids, adults, and passersby participate in creating a beautiful surrealistic view of a forest floor and vibrant giant golden chanterelle mushrooms. Although the mural is located in the back alley, it’s visible for quite a distance due to its placement and has even been made into a Pokemon Go stop. By taking part in this project I learned that paint in incredibly expensive, bureaucracy can be a struggle when all you want to do is create some art, and that hiring a good graphic designer and artist is well worth the cost. Many people have reached out to us over the last few months to share how much they enjoy the pop of colour in the sea of grey, and we even used some of the left-over paint to cover up some of the graffiti in the neighbourhood. We are currently looking for further uses for the rest of the leftover paint; maybe some little mushrooms will pop up around town in the future!
