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164 Stafford Street
Location Map
The East Wall.
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Location: NE corner Stafford & Grosvenor; East Face
Occupant: The Grove (formerly Tubby's Dining Room)
District: Fort Rouge
Neighbourhood: Crescentwood
Artist(s): Jennifer Johnson (Utopian Art Design), Mandy van Leeuwen
Year: 2002
Sponsors: Take Pride Winnipeg!, Richardson Foundation, Inc., Hertz Equipment Rentals, Grosvenor Square BIZ
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For several years, Mandy van Leeuwen frequented Tubby's Restaurant with her good
friend and fellow artist, Lisa who also enjoyed eating there. During one of these visits
one of them made the comment that someday, they should paint a Mural here. They
didn't know the owner then, they were just happy patrons. When Mandy actually WAS
commissioned to paint a mural here approximately four years later, Lisa had already
moved away.
Mandy: "We got along really well with the owner, Charlie. That wall involved a lot of
prep work, probably the most prep work of any Mural I've done. We had to hand scrape
that whole wall. It was just ridiculous how many layers of paint there were on there
before. There were so many nooks and crannies, it was a huge job and it had to be done
by hand. We couldn't just blast it off because of where it was close by the fence. It
works better to use a hand scraper anyway it's slower but you can do a much better job.
The large building featured in the Mural is the Stafford Building, which stands directly
across the street, a building rich in History. Charlie Clements, Tubby's owner knows the
building well as He himself has run his own restaurant business directly across the street
from it for forty years.
Mandy: "I painted that building with love; every brick, I painted on there and I think it
added a lot to it. It used to be an apartment building on the top and stores on the bottom.
There were different stores in there at the time that are named in there- Hardy and
Buchanan was one of them."
Charlie: Hardy & Buchanan have been there since 1926 so we wanted to put them on
there. Baird's Drug Store was next door also in the 1920s. I thought, let's go back
and get a little bit of our rich heritage. There were horses and buggies here. I like horses,
and suggested that be done up big on the left side. But I didn't want the scene cluttered
up with detail.
Charlie doesn't want the history of the area lost or forgotten, and wanted the elements of
affluence and vitality of the area recaptured and preserved in the Mural. Today, many of
the homes in the area STILL have the carriage houses for the horse buggy. Mandy: "We
found a picture of a woman in a horse and buggy and we used that as a point of reference
to create it. What you see is an upper class style of people as was the case in this area of
the city. And it was fun to do a nighttime scene. It was something that we'd been
wanting to do."
Jennifer Johnson: "We named the horse Charlie. Charlie Horse. If you look there's
actually a little brass plaque that says Charlie. Charlie was phenomenal and fun to work
with!"
Mandy: "I had a book of quotes and we decided that we really wanted to have a quote on
the Mural. It's nice to see, it's positive, it's uplifting to go with the experience of seeing
a Mural. We had a book with dozens and dozens of quotes and we really liked this quote
above all the rest, as it seemed to fit with the stars and the night scene. And we certainly
don't mind passing along a message like that to other people."
"It was tough working close to the fence. We were working in garbage, literally. There
were some garbage bins there and we had to put up our scaffolding there. Mondays were
our favourite."
Jennifer: "Garbage day was Monday but that meant working all weekend with the
garbage piled up high. By Saturday it was pretty rank. We had a scaffolding set up above
the garbage and if you dropped a paintbrush you had to go down to get it!"
The second East Facing wall was an experiment in cubism. After the restaurant closed in 2009, this wall was painted over, and can now only be viewed in the RIP section.
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