The Mural in Howick, on the corner of Fencible Drive and Cook Street.
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This was commissioned by the Howick Village Business Association, and paid for from a grant from the Department Of Justice. The brief for the work was broadly to be a historic, Howick depiction. The owners of the nearby “Rosscourt” said that they preferred a maritime theme.
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 Ron and Jo |
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Why the figures? Every time I got my camera out, I had to explain why I wanted to take their photo, and of course it became ‘posed’ straight away, so I had to go to a place that I could take photos, and not draw attention to myself. So while they were all looking at the animals, and the parade, I was photographing them from behind. I did no want too many that were looking straight at the paintings, as that would place the view from right behind them, as this is very boring for me to paint, and not very creative visually. They were painted in Oils, so that I could get the detail as near to the real thing as I can. Acrylics have the unhappy problem that they dry a different colour to when they are wet, and that I knew would be a problem if I had to touch these up later. The same thing applies with the paintings. |
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| The paintings, will they be stable outside? The frames are actually not framing at all, but builder’s architrave. I chose a hard wood, and further treated them. They are painted on a piece of Marine Ply that extends outside the frame, so that I could screw the frame to that, and not joining it at the corners as you would a real frame. The corners do not touch, so that hopefully the rain water will not lodge in the end grain, and the air can dry it out. They are also painted right round, and also they have been aged with a thin layer of tar. |
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Who are the figures? |
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The Second Mural in Howick, near to “Stockade Hill”. |
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This second Mural was completed in 2011, just as the Rugby World cup was happening. The existing mural was very badly fading, and the structure was rotting, so it had to go. I photographed it so that it will not be lost to the history of Howick.I decided to include figures, and the dark blue colour, to tie the two murals together, as I had already placed figures in the other mural, on the corner of Picton Street and Cook St. They have been more popular than the paintings, so I decided to do the same to this mural also, at the top of Picton Street. Both sets of figures were painted from photographs that I took while visiting the Auckland Zoo, with the exception of two of them that are my daughters. |
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The main part of the mural was painted from a photo that was originally taken back in 1910. It was taken from almost the exact same spot that the mural now occupies. This photo was selected as it is the photo that features on the cover of “Grey’s Folly” by Alan La Roche, a history of Howick. I painted the image in my studio, on a wood panel that is about 2400 x 1200 cm. The original work is for sale, and is featured in the “Gallery” section of this web site. This original Oil painting was then photographed using a 50 MP camera, and digitally expanded to the finished size of 7.6 metres x 2.5 metres. It was printed on five sticky back panels by “Sign It” of Sandringham. To my knowledge, this has never been done for a mural before. This project has been the most difficult and time consuming job that I have ever done. The photo gave me very little solid details and no colour references as I had only a very old black and white photocopy to work with. In the past, when I am having my work made into a print, I make the original work larger than the finished size is to be, so that the detail becomes tighter as the print is condensed down. In this mural, the exact opposite was the only way that I could work. The print became a lot looser as it was increased in size. So the original had to be tighter and more detailed to allow for this to happen. And I had less detail as a resource to start with than I had ever had!! I had to anticipate that the red colour of the iron roofs will fade, so I had to paint them in much more red than I would have liked to allow for the U.V to do what U.V. usually does. So it was no surprise that I did not know about the old church that stood at the far end of the road, but is not visible in original resource photo. My apologies for that!!
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 The completed mural |
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So why did I supply it as a sticky back digital image, and not just paint it on the spot?
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