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1854 Portage Avenue (2)
Location Map
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Location: S side bet. Roseberry & Collegiate; East Face (top)
Occupant: College of Registered Psychiatric Nurses of Manitoba
District: St. James
Neighbourhood: Bruce Park
Artist(s): Mandy van Leeuwen, Lisa Young-Kutsukake
Year: 1998
Sponsors: Take Pride Winnipeg!, Northern Paint Supply, St. James Village BIZ
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John Steel (St. James BIZ): "The city of Winnipeg amalgamated in 1972 to include all its
smaller areas around it including St. James, St. Boniface, Fort Rouge, Fort Garry, and so
on. Before that, St. James used to be called 'the Airport City'. We wanted to pay tribute
to this fact and to the Western Canadian Aviation Museum that's up there. Historically,
we then went back to World War II, which was a critical part of Canadian history. We
wanted to use the Lancaster, which was one of the primary bombers flown in World War
II. We got the pictures from the Museum. We wanted to depict the Lancaster in a
peaceful mission flying across the prairies."
Mandy van Leeuwen: "R.P.N.A.M. donated the wall. John Steel had done some work
with the Aviation Museum down on Ferry Road and thought that this Lancaster would be
the right plane to put up here. He had a great picture of this plane. So what we did is we
formed the landscape and put the plane up. The Lancaster Bomber took about 2 days and
the rest of it took 3 weeks. We loved the perspective- straight on, beautiful square lines,
symmetry. The interest of it is when you're down on the street it looks like it's going to
land on you. It's coming straight at you."
"It's a sun-kissed morning scene and being an east faced wall a morning view will
capture it the best. We thought that this landscape would represent Manitoba really well
and the colours of how Manitoba is in the morning. Because it was May when we were
painting we spent a lot of time dealing with rain, and the rain was creating a lot of water
on the roof so there'd be two to four inches of water continuously (see Photo 2) so we
wore our galoshes and we also worked on planks up there. We spent most of our days up
there with wet feet."
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