Ottawa
This summer I had the opportunity to do the artwork for Marin Urban Beer Garden, located at 345 Preston Street in Ottawa. This project was a great chance to get colourful and play with some sweet background fades. If you’re in Ottawa swing by to check out the space, and grab a beer while you’re at it.
My most recent mural, located in Hintonburg, Ottawa is all about balance. The neighbourhood has a working class history, but in recent years has seen much growth and change, and has come to be known as one of Ottawa’s most interesting, culture-filled hotspots. I wanted to reference this history and current state of growth in a subtle way, and chose to symbolize the two aspects via the objects the figure is holding. It can be seen as the past in one hand, and the present/future in the other.
I was recently featured by Ottawa Tourism as part of their new campaign Ottawa's Own, which puts a selection of local creatives, entrepreneurs, and interesting people in the spotlight. They tagged along while I painted my mural for the Banff Avenue Community House in the fall, and created a short video profiling me and my work. A big thanks to Just Pixl for the great film work!
I recently had the opportunity to create two interior murals for a local adult high school in Ottawa. The goal was to bring some new life and positive energy into a setting that is constantly looking for new ways to inspire its students.
Glow Fair is an annual festival that takes over Bank Street in Ottawa for one weekend, transforming the street into a place for art installations, live music, vendors, and in general just a big party. For this year's event myself and fellow artists Dom Laporte and Dan Martelock built a temporary cube structure on which to paint. Here is my piece from the event.
All in all, 2016 was a crazy one. Aside from getting married, I was fortunate enough to fill my year with a variety of projects, including several mural gigs. Here's a quick summary of them.
Canada Science and Technology Museum
Organized by House of Paint, this mural was one of many for the Canada Science and Tech Museum in Ottawa. The murals are on the construction site hoarding wall of the new museum, which is set to open in Fall 2017. I was given a private tour of the museum collection, and chose to use certain antique objects from this tour in the mural design.
Bellevue Community Centre
This colourful and vibrant piece was commissioned by Crime Prevention Ottawa and Ottawa Community Housing as a way to bring life to an otherwise grey area. This was an incredible community engagement project, as I was given a stack of sketches from a local youth group and was given the task of drawing inspiration from them. Some themes that the kids wanted me to include were inclusivity, love, colour, peace, and community.
City of Ottawa Underpass Program
This mural was commissioned by the City of Ottawa as the latest addition to the city's murals on underpasses program. The wall is adjacent to the Rideau Canal pathway and is therefore themed around the history of the canal as a UNESCO world heritage site and a local landmark.
Makerspace North
This piece is located inside the local creative hub Makerspace North.
Beau's Oktoberfest
I had the chance to finish off the mural season by live painting at one of my favourite brewery's Oktoberfest. A big thanks to Beau's Brewery and Antique Skate for making this one happen!
One of my murals this past summer sent me in a bit of a new direction. What made this project unique was the amount of community engagement and collaboration with youth groups. This sort of community-centric process was something very new to me, but proved to be a rewarding experience.
This mural started as a youth engagement project. Kids at the Caldwell gym were given sketch pads and were asked to put some ideas to paper and explore a little bit of their creative sides. The sketches were collected and given to me, and it was my task to use them as inspiration to put together a cohesive design for the mural. It was a great experience for me working with the kids' designs as inspiration. I found that across all the sketches there were themes of community, peace, love, and togetherness. This gave me a solid base of ideas to work from. In working with the unique space ratio of the wall, I created one main focal point in the center, which I think is more impactful to the viewer than having to read a long group of images across the entire length of the wall. The group of hands embracing each other represents those themes mentioned earlier, and are meant to be a symbol of inclusivity and togetherness.
Although it isn't a direct copy of the kids' sketches, the design is a creative interpretation. The ideas that I used from their sketches were: the colourful background pattern, a fading from dark to light/colour, the idea of "helping hands", the use of mandalas (symbol for the universe, unity, harmony), and building outlines.
It was an absolute pleasure creating the piece because I got to interact with the community as I worked, and received an overwhelmingly positive response.
I recently teamed up with House of Paint to create a mural at the construction site of the new Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. It features objects from the museum's collection, and at 81 feet wide it is my largest piece to date.
I recently met with Andrea Stokes, a writer for the Kitchissippi Times, at my Ottawa studio. I'd been elected to be featured as part of a continuing series on local artists. I shared my thoughts on art and murals in Ottawa, what the current situation is and how it's changing. You can check it out here.
