We introduce you to a range of people— from a Haida graffiti artist to a British painter—brightening the East Side’s walls at the Vancouver Mural Festival,
The VMF returns to add more than 60 new public artworks to the city. Meet a few of the people transforming our walls
After adding more than 40 artworks to city walls last year, the Vancouver Mural Festival is upping the ante for its second celebration, Monday to next Saturday (August 7 to 12).
It’s increased its artist roster, brightening up Strathcona and Mount Pleasant with 60 murals this year, culminating in a big daytime street party and an evening Underplay Music Festival on August 12. A full 10 blocks in Mount Pleasant will be closed to traffic during the day, including Main Street between East 12th and East 7th avenues, as well as the alley between Main and Quebec streets. Up to 100,000 people are expected to visit the completed murals and take in live art, music by the likes of Yukon Blonde and Louise Burns, markets, and a beer garden between noon and 6 p.m.
In the days leading up to that, look for speaker panels presented by the Georgia Straight next Wednesday (August 9) at Heritage Hall, gallery shows, and much more. (See Straight.com and vanmuralfest.ca/.)
The beating heart of the fest is the artists whose work will help bring this city’s walls to life. The fest was launched, in part, to help them access large, permanent public locations on which to create their wild visions. Finding such spots in Vancouver—a city with the highest per capita concentration of artists in Canada—had been notoriously difficult. Inspired by the street art that thrived in cities elsewhere in the world and by similar events, the team formed to carve out that space for a wide range of artists for the first fest last year.
Riding on that success, this year’s fest brings together everyone from Indigenous artists to graffiti artists to gallery artists who aren’t even known for murals. We wanted to introduce you to just a few of them.
COREY BULPITT
Corey Bulpitt has been spending his days on a 2
lift at Columbia and East Hastings, painting a flock of pigeons onto Pigeon Park Savings.
He hasn’t been alone. The Haida artist has had the help of his nine-year-old son, manning the lift and bringing him paint cans. And Bulpitt tells the Straight that people stop and talk to him all day long.
“It’s all positive,” he says. “People are happy something nice is going on the wall. It was kind of a grimy-looking building before.”
This piece, titled East Van Pigeon, is far from Bulpitt’s first mural. He’s been doing graffiti since he was 15, and Vancouverites will recognize his work under the Granville Street Bridge, as well as his two pieces from last year’s mural festival, at Main and Broadway and on the side of the Native Education College on East 5th Avenue. His Haida name, Taakeit Aaya, translates to “Gifted Carver”, and he’s perhaps best-known for his intricate totem carvings.
But despite his body of work, Bulpitt remembers a time when the crackdown on graffiti was so strict, he was almost ready to move—particularly because police wanted him to turn in the young street artists he was working with.
“For many years, it’s been a shitty city for doing public art,” says Bulpitt. “I’ve been to places like Paris and Montreal, where there’s lots of public art and it’s a better vibe. Murals create a sense of community. You see people enjoying themselves and looking up rather than just walking by and rushing to get past an ugly building.”
As one of the few artists in this year’s Vancouver Mural Festival lineup working outside the Mount Pleasant area, Bulpitt is especially conscious of the effect public art can have on people who rarely see it.
A few years ago, he installed his carving Urban Eagle at Main and Hastings, and says he was floored by the reaction.
“People were weeping with joy. I didn’t know it would have that impact,” says Bulpitt. “People were sharing their whole souls with me. It brought back memories for them, of fishing camps, their struggles to get sober.”
Urban Eagle was only up for a few hours, but East Van Pigeon—which will be unveiled at noon on Tuesday (August 8)—is here to stay. Bulpitt has been developing the design for a while, and it fits well with its locale. The pigeon pattern is a tribute to the neighbourhood, with variations in colour to show that all pigeons—and people—are different, with their own colourful stories.
Birds are a Bulpitt motif—large creatures of flight that make people look up. But he also comments on public art’s power to make people feel seen.
“Some of the bleaker places I think need it the most,” says Bulpitt. “It shows the city cares about its people, bringing it back to the ground level of human beings.” > HOLLY MCKENZIE-SUTTER
DAVID SHILLINGLAW
Life has become nomadic for in-demand 2
U.K. artist David Shillinglaw. Fresh off the plane from Italy, the painter is touching down for a few days in Vancouver to tackle two murals, before jetting off for Zurich. He’s moved out of his London studio, and is, in his own words, “temporarily homeless”—dedicating his days to his art.
“It’s a bit crazy-making,” he tells the Straight on the line from outside a Vancouver coffee shop, with a laugh. “I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie—like I’m this weird artist who travels around the world spouting nonsense on the telephone to people he hasn’t met.”
A graduate of London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins university, Shillinglaw didn’t intially embrace mural painting during his degree studies. While artists like Banksy were picking up international recognition, the painter was always conscious of street art, but more keenly aware that his university looked down on it. It was an accident that he started putting paint on walls.
“Somewhere along the line when I was making installations, I started thinking about using the other parts of the space as well as the canvas,” he recalls. “Then I began to realize that doing murals was something different from just trying to sell a painting. If it’s a wall, you can’t really sell it, so it removes the commercial part of art and makes it more of a performance or experience. I really revelled in the superherolike quality of people going out in the night and painting graffiti, and art that was outside started to really compel me.”
The power of Shillinglaw’s work is in its ability to represent, as he puts it, the “human experience”. Many of his murals incorporate faces—but never recognizable people. Rather, his bright paintings depict generic characters: neither male nor female, old nor young, black nor white. Eyes, too, are a common motif—a theme Shillinglaw enjoys for its personifying aspect. “If you put eyes on a wall painting,” he says, “they think, ‘Ah, that building now has a personality’.” Often mixing randomly chosen words with his images, the artist creates a collection of universal symbols and ideas.
“I enjoy all kinds of art,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just a word in a nice typography, sometimes it’s a pattern, sometimes it’s a figure. I see my work as a huge cauldron of different movements and influences—it mixes abstraction, surrealism, impressionism, fauvism, graphic design, illustration, and a whole lot of other isms. I steal ideas from the past, remix them, and make them mine. I think style is the mistakes that people make when they copy.” > KATE WILSON
SANDEEP JOHAL
Sandeep Johal has had a busy year. When her 2
maternity leave ended last October, she quit her teaching job at the Immigrant Services Society of B.C. to work as a full-time artist.
“It was very scary,” Johal tells the Straight. “I’ve just been hustling. It’s been good.”
Johal looks after her two-year-old son during the day and spends her evenings on her art. And it’s paid off. Her work can be found on a series of banners in Surrey, a concrete planter in Strathcona, and a 22-metre barrier in New Westminster. She’s currently preparing her first solo show, Rest in Power, at Vancouver’s Gam Gallery this September. And this week she’ll be painting as a part of the Vancouver Mural Festival, decorating the side of Chutney Villa in Mount Pleasant, the neighbourhood she’s called home since 2006.
“Either it’s because they’re Indian or I love dosas, I don’t know,” she jokes. “But it’s a really cool spot. I walk past it all the time, so it’s going to be really cool to walk past there and see my mural almost every day.”
Johal is planning to combine her two signatures—geometric shapes and detailed black-andwhite figures—for her mural while also incorporating colourful floral patterns. It’s another step in her journey to discover her developing artistic voice.
Johal says the support she’s received after joining the female art collective THRIVE Studio has helped her build the confidence to apply for opportunities like the mural festival.
“I think the biggest turning point was me actually believing I could do this,” says Johal, “that having a career as an artist was attainable.”
It’s been a long road to get here. Johal has been drawing all her life, and pursued a diploma in fine art at Langara when she turned 30, but the daughter of South Asian immigrants says that her parents haven’t always been on the same page.
“I had a lot of cultural struggle and a lot of uncertainty when it came to that,” says Johal. “I don’t know if my parents really understand what I’m doing, but they can see that I’m succeeding at it and they can see that I’m really happy about it, so I think that’s been good for them.”
As she prepares to start working on her muralfest piece, Johal has a lineup of friends, family, and peers at the ready to offer support. Her husband will be watching her son during the week, but he’ll be popping in every day to assist, possibly armed with a small paintbrush to make his mark on the work.
a 13-by-7-metre mural at 137 East 4th Avenue. Portraying a girl and her Boston terrier seemingly leaping into the galaxy—as illustrated by what the artist describes as “bright rings, planets, stars, and cool space costumes”—the mural will be the largest public piece Fowlie has ever designed and painted.
Given his initial hesitation when he was offered the sizable space as a canvas, the inspiration behind the work is especially close to the creative’s heart. “I was almost too scared to take it on at first,” he admits. “But my friends and my family just encouraged me to take it. And my mom, specifically, said, ‘If someone’s asking you to take a leap…’ And that word leap became the theme of this mural. Taking a leap—taking a leap of faith.”
> LUCY LAU