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385 Henderson Highway
Location Map
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Location: NE corner Henderson & Larsen; South Face
Occupant: Roxy Lanes
District: East Kildonan
Neighbourhood: Chalmers
Artist(s): Mike Valcourt
Year: 1998
Sponsors: Take Pride Winnipeg!, Glidden Paint
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Mike Valcourt: "This one is 65 to 70 feet long and 25 feet high. The wall was in pretty
rough shape. It was like sandstone in that when you rub your finger on it would turn to
powder. That was a big problem that we had to tackle so I used a galvanized primer that
coagulated with everything."
"This was my first Mural. I had all this artistic energy bubbling up inside me. I tackled
this wall in an amazing 12 to 15 days. Two weeks to do something like this is fantastic. I
had all these ideas and they all seemed to come out through my hands and the brush. I
didn't really use anything for a reference like pictures per se. I drew the animals out of
my head. The only thing I had a picture of was this Kingfisher sitting on a rock. If you
look closely at the wall, you'll see I've labelled everything to say what it is: the
Kingfisher, Canada Geese, wolf, seagulls, and so on. There is a bear a hiding in the trees
to the right of the tracks in the foreground."
"The scene, although not reminiscent of Winnipeg, is what the owner wanted. He wanted
an outdoor scene with the rocks and trees and mountains. Painting around that staircase
was fun! On the left side there was a birdhouse that I knocked down by accident! This
wall was pretty crazy. Not only did I get it done really fast and I got a lot of my creative
energy out, but it also taught me a lot about painting Murals: scope, the grand size of it,
perspective, how to be free and loose with the painting. When you're dealing with
something that big, even the smallest brush stroke can blend in with the rest and really
doesn't take much to create say a reflection in the water or highlight on a tree. So I really
wasn't too concerned about how it looked up close; but that's hard to do at first when
you're working up close! At first, I had to climb down off the scaffolding quite a bit to
stand back and look at what I was doing; but after a while I got really confident in what I
was doing and knowing what would look good from normal viewing distance."
"That was one of the hottest Murals I've ever done. It was a scorcher. That wall gets the
sun all day long, and anybody who's painted a wall knows that it's 20 hotter with the
rays of the sun bouncing off the wall. It's not a profession to be in if you're prone to
sunstroke: just wear a hat and keep drinking water!"
"There's also a little girl there; she was a neighbourhood girl, Alana. She was six years
old at the time, so I painted her and wrote her name on the wall. She was drawn exactly
to scale and wearing what she had on that day. In exchange, I bought her a slurpee which
he shared with her sister. The next day her mom came down and she bought ME a
slurpee! About three years later, I was driving by and I saw her walking down the road!
She recognized me and then she stood up against the wall showed me how much she'd
grown. That was neat to see her pride in community, the Mural, and that she still lived in
the neighbourhood."
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