Churwell Mural

I was approached in the last weeks of the summer term to paint a mural in the library at Churwell Primary. They have recently become a part of the Resilience Trust and the Trust was giving them money for a new library. I went along to measure up and didn’t expect it to be 63 square meters of yellow wall, with multiple surfaces, tiles and some fairly big holes. They had already names the different zones - Solar Library and Luna Lounge. They wanted trees and something relaxing. So I painted a night sky with a moon and woodland.

I brought my fantastic daughter along to help me as I knew it would take three weeks if I didn’t have help. I have chronic back pain and I need to take things slowly, but this job was a big job, and I genuinely don't know what I’d have done without her help.

We started the job in the last week of summer and it took a week just to prepare before we painted the mural. Me and Poppy were painting and as the kids came through the library, they would say ‘It smells like paint’. They said it a lot - so me and Poppy had a bet on how many times it would be said by the end of term. The loser bought the chocolate milk shakes on Friday - I lost the bet. It was said about 15- 20 times in total and then when they knew me and poppy had a bet on, they deliberately would walk through and repeatedly say ‘It smells like paint’. It was a very funny end to the week.

I do like painting but its not my main artistic medium, as you can see from my artwork in my bio, its sculptural so I had to do a lot of visual problem solving with this painting.

Here are the images below of the work, I think it will look good when its all fitted over summer.