04 Nov Painting a mural for the Graham & Green stand at Decorex.
I recently had an email from the arts manager Jamey at Graham and Green, his boss James Graham had spotted a wallpaper mural that he liked and had charged Jamey with finding a muralist in London to paint it.
Jamey got very excited when his image search found some murals which were the same and more so when the mural artist was based in London, so he contacted me immediately.
Initially we discussed painting a mural which was the same type of theme but simplified as we only had a slot of one and half days to complete three sides of a wall 12 metres long and 3 metres high.
Jamey visited my south London studio and we played around with some ideas and I created a scaled sketch which was sent to his boss James Graham, and as what happens a lot of the time the sketch helped to solidify his original inspiration.
Back to the drawing board and I took the original mural and stripped away all the extra bits of foliage and concentrated on making the main component which was Palm trees look as interesting as possible with movement and varying the sizes to get a sense of depth.
The mural was to be painted in monochrome with a dark blue slate background and off white palms with warmer tones of a raw umber and sienna mix shading to give a slightly 3D effect and make the palms stand out.
Because of the time factor I needed to get the murals up and painted quickly, so I divided the images into prescaled sections of 3×3 metres and we used one of my low throw projectors to get the images onto the wall.
This is quite easy but in practice Decorex which is held in Olympia has 200 display stalls all being set up on the same day, it is exciting but chaotic. When we put the projector up in the passageway we had people passing and getting palm trees shone onto them.
The good news was that when people saw the team of three artists hand painting a mural with the 8 palm trees in such a short time it showed the other store holders a possible alternative to using wall paper.
The first day we worked from 8am to 7pm, a long day but we managed to finish by 11.30am the next morning which gave the Graham & Green team the rest of the day to arrange the lighting and get all the furniture and accessories.
The end result looked stunning. The Palm tree mural was a perfect background to show off the tasteful eclectic furniture which Graham & Green are famous for and it was a great experience and fun for us all to work together as a team. With such interest I hope more interior and furniture designers will be commissioning mural artists to paint their walls instead of using wallpaper.
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