"Painting a mural is a bit like singing a song live” says artist Kieron Black, “only you’re singing it in front of the most random audience you can imagine and you're not 100% you know all the words!"
I was delighted to be asked to facilitate the triple mural Downpatrick project with Translink, Downpatrick Primary and St Brigid’s Primary, and I can’t really take any credit for the fantastic concept the two schools came up with – it was a such a beautifully simple, elegant, uplifting message and all I did was put it on the wall.
I love doing murals, it’s an exciting, live process where everything is played out in real time in front of the public. When it’s going right you’re a rock star and when it goes a bit wobbly you’re just an idiot with a spray can... it’s quite the mix of emotions.
And for a mural like the bus station, i.e. one that doesn't require a MEWP (mobile elevated work platform), you are fully exposed to whatever it is ‘Johnny and Janey Public’ have to throw at you, and believe me, they’ve got some curveballs!
‘But every day is a school day, and it’s important to keep that in mind. Like, when I had the outline done for the main butterfly, a member of the public asked me what the butterfly it was going to be. I should have known from his ‘entomology’ t-shirt featuring an array of butterflies and their respective Latin names that I was in for a potentially spicy exchange.
‘Uh, it’s a monarch?’
‘Oh I don’t like that’ he said, sucking air through his teeth like a car mechanic about to give you bad news, ‘that’s an American butterfly! They come here by mistake!’
‘By mistake’ I said, ‘are they bad with their little butterfly maps then?’
Fortunately, he laughed at that, and then I laughed, and then went home and did my homework and changed it to a Red Monarch.
Another person asked me who had done the original mural, and why I was painting over it. This utterly confused me as it had definitely been a blank wall when I started... then I realised he was talking about the doodle grid I had placed on the wall earlier in the week.
In order to scale up the image from my original drawing muralists used to use a basic grid drawn over the source image which would then be scaled up and painted on the actual wall... but then some clever person figured out that it needn’t be a regular grid, you could draw absolutely anything (doodles!) on the wall and then use software to place your original image over the doodle, make it transparent so you can see the doodles below and hey presto you can navigate your image expansion quite easily - much like a join-the-dots picture.
I had been quite a word salad and cheeky with my grid, as I find words are a lot easier to navigate than symbols when it comes to orientation, and the person had assumed that the grid was the actual mural artwork!
It is accepted amongst muralists that the Catch 22 of a doodle grid is that the exact time you save doing a random grid instead of a measured one is completely used up explaining to everyone what a doodle grid actually is. C’est la vie.
There was one other incident involving the grid... I had gone down to the mural site on the first day and painted the grid on the bus station. As I was happily spraying gibberish onto a public wall I found myself suddenly surrounded by a flock of young ‘electric scooterists’ who wanted to know if I was ‘allowed to do that’. On hearing that I was, they muttered a number of flattering expletives, nodded wisely to each other and ‘flocked’ off.
The next morning I arrived down to find that a number of anonymous and extremely helpful artists had embellished my grid in multiple places with the letters ‘UTH’. I suspect, but cannot obviously confirm, that my anonymous helpers were not the tallest as there wasn’t a single ‘UTH’ above an operational ceiling of about 5 feet.
It should be noted however that these additions, being in both a different style and colour from my own grid, were of significant help in navigating said grid and I thank my mysterious benefactors for this. Good work on the UTH’s!
But the big takeaway from ‘The Butterfly Effect' is the genuine positivity generated by it in the hearts of the passers-by and how they were inspired to take the time to say so. I hope that this effect long continues in the town of Downpatrick and I thank everyone at Translink, Downpatrick Primary and St Brigid’s Primary for making me a part of this wonderful project.