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2160 Wellington Avenue
'Team Spirit'.
This eyecatching Mural is practically the first thing visitors from the airport inbound sees. It was painted in 2001 by Charlie Johnston and Dave Bezilla as a project brokered by Graffiti Arts Programming. Additional Sponsorship was provided by The Rotary Club of Winnipeg West. Jeff Burling, Melissa Honke and Richard Manoakeesick assisted as painters. By 2017, the Mural Sports Icons depicted in the Mural were completely out of date and was replaced by a new Mural with a different theme.
Original notes follow:===
Steve Wilson (Graffiti Art Programming): "This all started when Leonard Asper made a
comment in the local media about the way Winnipeg looked to visitors arriving from the
airport. In response to Mr. Asper's comment, the Rotary Club decided to sponsor Murals
along the corridor from the airport to downtown. The original concept of this Mural was
somewhat different than this; it was a much simpler downtown Winnipeg design, and
then it got changed into this photo-real depiction of the three major sports franchises in
our city. It's a beautiful Mural to greet visitors to our city."
Charlie Johnston : "With this one I had 24 hours to get a design together and get
reference images from all three teams and put together a design for a meeting at the
airport. For Milt Stegall, I used the popular image of him from the Blue Bombers web
site. With the Manitoba Moose I was lucky because they just gotten back a bunch of
pictures that they were going to use to design hockey cards. The picture of (Kevin) Orga
I got off the Goldeyes website."
"That was an airbrush job because of the textures of the wall were not amenable to
brushwork so, aside from laying out some base of colours, we pretty much did the whole
job with airbrushes and paint sprayers. Dave (Bezilla) was perfect for this project
because he's an airbrush artist; almost all his work is airbrush. This is one we did in
conjunction with the Graffiti Gallery. "
"This one took us three weeks. It was late in the season. It was snowing when we signed
it. It was actually because of the Athletes Wear Mural (see 145
Market ) that this design was chosen. I did up some designs for them
and met with them and showed them my portfolio; the second they saw the Athletes
Wear Mural they said we want that! It became a good promotional item for the three
teams. Dave did the portrait of the Manitoba Moose player, and I did the other two."
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