It’s a wrap! We have finished the mural! It now exists as a very large digital rendering which will be printed and installed, in advance of Art Crawl 2023 (September 16). Rebecca and I will be at a booth outside the museum, facing the mural during ArtCrawl to show aspects of the mural and return the colourings to museum campers.
The actual mural will be 100 feet long by 8 feet tall so it is a very long, multilayered collage – which makes it difficult to absorb all in one look, as you can see by this strip below. When the mural has been mounted on the wall, you will likely be seeing different sections at a time.
So… following are more detailed images with background on the various sections but first, a recap:
- This mural was commissioned by the Town of Collingwood in partnership with Streetcar Developments and the Collingwood Museum, for the construction wall across the road from the museum.
- This mural is about the history of Collingwood, in particular the railway which transformed us from a small fishing village called Hen and Chickens Harbour to a major port on the Great Lakes. This mural commemorates 150 years of the railway and the museum building that was built 25 years ago to look like the 1873 station.
- The children who attended the museum camps this summer participated by colouring in our illustrations of hens and chickens in period costumes or doing fun activities. This is the parade along the bottom of the mural. Sandra produced all the fun, comical sketches of the chicks which we digitized.
- This is a mixed media creation. There are original paintings, original photography, archival photos and drawings and digital design, as well as didactic panels along the top with some fun history about Collingwood. All of this was pulled together, along with the kids’ colourings into a digital file for printing on vinyl which will be attached to the hoarding wall. Some images, especially old archival drawings, will look great from a distance, others may be grainy when you’re standing right up against them but there’s a lot to see up close too!
In this first quarter of the mural (on the far left if you are standing across the road to see the whole thing), you will see that some etchings from an 1875 drawing of ships in Collingwood harbour are collaged into our sunset background and the parade along the bottom has begun!
This next section shows roughly the second quarter of the mural with the hand drawn “bird’s eye view” map from 1875 of the Collingwood Harbour, leading into a beautiful and impactful train, painted by Rebecca Remme and a Railway Crossing sign that is still found near the Depot Museum… and of course the parade continues!
In this section 3 of the mural, the railway station from the late 1800’s is depicted followed by a map of the Great Lakes drawn around that time and then leading into Rebecca’s amazing original painting of the Blue Mountains.
In the final section of the mural, we have a panoramic photograph of Blue Mountain and our Grain Terminal (by Eden Watt) and then blueprints for the museum building and finally another photo by Eden of the museum building today. Of course the parade continues and you will see many of them in the later sections are either skiers or dressed in more modern costumes.
The name we chose for the mural is “Sunset Chronicles: Collingwood’s Journey by Rail, Sea, and Ski”