During Gecko Press’s Picture Me festival, European illustrators Antje Damm, Aurore Petit and Piotr Socha will be painting a window at Te Auaha Gallery in central Wellington. We’ll be posting updates as the mural progresses.
Thursday 12 September
The first sketches are up!
Our photographer Genevieve Knowles—a student in Whitireia Polytechnic’s Graduate Diploma in Publishing course—can also be spotted.
The outline for the first piece went up late in the day. Students from the Whitireia course, which is also inside the Te Auaha campus, have expressed their appreciation that the figure is holding a book.
If you’d like to see the illustrators at work, you can pop along to Te Auaha during one of their sessions:
Sunday 15 September, 12–1pm
Tuesday 17 September, 9–11am
Wednesday 18 September, 11.30am–12.30pm.
The illustrators’ work can be also be seen alongside artwork by many local childrens’ illustrators in an exhibition inside Te Auaha Gallery.
Stay tuned for our next update!
Friday 13 September
The mural is beginning to look very colourful! There are vibrant pinks, blues, and yellows now dotted across the painting. Our wonderful figure now has some patterned clothes with pink and yellow flowers and fantastic striped pants. The colour scheme is very reminiscent of Aurore Petit’s picture books A Mother is a House and My Baby Sister is a Diplodocus.
The mural is painted with washable paint markers that allow you to really see the strokes and movement in the colour.
If you look closely, you can see some little critters popping up around the figure. There’s a blue bird, a yellow ladybug, and a little yellow and blue bumblebee. There are also leaves, clouds and a sun, reminiscent of a child’s drawing with geometric rays stretching out.
Antje Damm tells us they still have lots to do and will be back on the job on Sunday afternoon.
Sunday 15 September
Seeing the mural is one thing, but watching the illustrators paint is another experience entirely. Antje Damm, Aurore Petit, and Piotr Socha can all be seen hard at work planning, measuring, and carefully colouring in different shapes and patterns. It is mesmerising to watch their careful, almost entirely silent work.
Visitors come and go as the artists create, but they’re absorbed in their work. It’s quiet enough for a visitor to remark that the artists’ markers make a ‘satisfying sound’ on the glass. Children looking at the exhibition exclaim at the images they recognise from favourite books (‘look! It’s Duck in the Gun!’ … ‘that’s Paku Manu [Ariki] Whakatakapōkai!’).
There have been a lot of developments to the mural itself. Piotr has added leaves and dots to the pattern on the figure’s clothing as well as some more yellow bees (which he drew completely before using a finger to carefully erase the stripes into the image).
Antje began painting a cat but, after a quick conversation with the other artists about scale, opted for a beautiful pink dragonfly instead. After some creative problem-solving, Aurore completed the stripes on the figure’s pants—note how the stripes have been overlapped at the top!
Piotr told us that the three artists met each other only ten days ago, have very different styles of drawing and that they’re working with unfamiliar pens and working out how to best use them as they go. It’s amazing how cohesive the mural looks! He elaborated that Aurore provided the outline of the figure, and he and Antje are adding elements of their own style.
Passers by only seem to register that the painting is happening as they near the edge of the mural—often looking back over their shoulders as they see that the artists are at work! Some stop to examine the details, smiling at the lively colour.
There will be another opportunity to watch them work between 9 and 10am on Tuesday morning.
Tuesday 17 September
Colours! Flowers! Shapes! There are so many fantastic additions to the mural today and it is now complete! The artists have absolutely filled the space and they’ve now signed the mural, so you can spot their signatures among the bright patterns.
The reserved colour palette of pink, yellow, and blue has been consistent throughout the painting. The repetitive colours have created a striking and playful effect. It’s amazing that three artists with such distinctive styles have combined their talents to create a unified image.
We do recommend getting along to the exhibition if you can to see works by Donovan Bixley, Gavin Bishop, Dylan Horrocks, Brian Lovelock, Kieran Rynhart, Lily Emo and Isobel Joy Te Aho-White, among others!
Thanks to Genevieve Knowles for her work photographing the mural over the course of the week, and to the artists for answering our questions and having us watch them at work! Here is the mural in its final state, pictured at a celebration for the conclusion of the Picture Me events in Wellington.
