The Murals of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: Murals
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546 Academy Road    Location Map
  

"Starry Starry Wedding Night"


Location: SW corner Academy & Lanark; East Face

Occupant: 7th Avenue Fashions

District: River Heights

Neighbourhood: Sir John Franklin

Artist(s): Charlie Johnston (C5 Artworks)

Year: 2009

Sponsors: Take Pride Winnipeg!, Academy Road BIZ

 

Charlie Johnston: "My first idea for this wall was to do a version of a Gustav Klimt painting, 'The Kiss'. I was going to make it into a wedding kiss, and put her in a wedding gown and use a lot of gold leaf in the design. This is Academy Road, so I wanted to do something with a bit more of that European flavour, and the 20th century art movements of Europe. There are a lot of those style of shops in the Academy Road BIZ district. I did up something and showed it to the client who declined, having some very specific ideas of what they did want. This is Seventh Avenue Fashions. They're from New York so she wanted a New York skyline, she wanted van Gogh's 'Starry Starry Night' as the sky; and she also gave me these stylized cartoons, similar to 60's style characters that you would see in the opening sequences of movies (e.g., the Pink Panther)."

"My task was to amalgamate these elements into a cohesive image, and this (the finished Mural) is how it came out. She gave me a lot of input about colours and style, dresses, and that sort of thing; because it's about fashion. And, as Carrie says in Sex and the City, 'it's all about the dress'. So the dress became the principal element of the Mural."

"I like the idea of the metallic reflectiveness in the design. I used a silver enamel as the finishing element in the dress. I also used it in the windows of the city, and a little bit of it in the stars themselves. I wanted everything to glimmer."

"I was also thinking a lot about some of the more urban stylizations of characters, particularly using big eyes in their art, drawn from the anime style, and the doe-y cartoon eyes. In this case I wanted to apply that into more of a fashion sensibility. It's a girl's Mural! The Empire State building and the Chrysler Building are both there- the rest of the skyline is stylized."

"It was a mid-range stucco wall, and I'm happy with the way it turned out. It was fun to do."