Belonging Action, Vancouver
24 by 32 feet on the Harbour Centre facade, for the City of Vancouver. Ninety young people contributed stories about belonging, and the painting was built from them. Acrylic on Crezone panels, installed complete.
Case in point · Maroon Bells, Denver
Maroon Bells, painted to give a small backyard its distance back
The couple who own this house have a personal connection to Maroon Bells, so that is the view that went on the wall. Their yard is small and the parking garage behind it presented a tall blank wall at close range, so painting distance onto it was the entire idea: the peaks, the conifers and the still water below carry your eye past the wall rather than stopping at it. The yard reads as a larger space now, which is what they were hoping for.
They wanted a naturalistic landscape and were wary of strong color taking a small yard over. The restrained palette was our recommendation for exactly that reason. Held-back values do the spatial work quietly, so the mural opens the space instead of competing for attention inside it, and the whole image is carried by value rather than hue. That is the harder way to paint a landscape and the right one here.
The surface was heavily textured garage siding, which drinks paint and needs a different hand than drywall. Four painting days across two weekends, worked entirely from a ladder. The door and window are absorbed into the composition rather than worked around: the door reads as forest, the window sits in the treeline.
