Canada Games Mural 2013

Click on "Next" and discover the five favorite paintings of the artisans of MURIRS...

Top photos
Clément Drolet and Raphaëlle Coulombe-Allie (from MURIRS).

Bottom photos
Émile Poissant and Lara Poulin (from MURIRS).

This panel is an important point in the face of the athlete that is represented in large format. His arms serve as arch of the eyebrows.

When you look closely, you can see characters, and when you step back, you can see very precisely the eyes of the athlete who is running.

What’s interesting in this painting is the regional approach that was represented by madam Desrosiers: a sport from her province. They have their own culture and even their own sporting identity. Here we can call it the “one foot high kick”. The person in Nunavut, the athlete, must kick an object at a height of a basketball; it’s pretty impressive. There is a very cultural approach among these 224 paintings.

Denis Jacques, a portrait painter, wanted to pay homage to an artist known in the region of Estrie, Madam Josée Perreault, who passed away in 2013.

Ultranan is an artist from Sherbrooke who makes his little figures across the city of Sherbrooke with a touch of humour. His work is about political and social issues, and we are very happy to have him in our mural.

Why is it part of the favorites? It’s because of her representation of figure skating. Julie, instead of working only on the skating, also decided to integrate the ice as a visual element in her work.

Therefore, you can see, behind the skater, all the scratches made by the skates. It’s quite remarkable; when skaters finish their performance, you can see that the skating rink is really defaced. Madam Kaldenhoeven decided to integrate it in her work to make a whole; this approach is really interesting.

The idea I had at first was to paint a portrait that could be seen from below. Then, I took an athlete of 2011 from the Université de Sherbrooke. One of the interests I had was that we had the name Sherbrooke on it, to promote our own agenda a little. His name is Simon Charbonneau-Campeau. He is an athlete who truly exists, and he is aware that I painted his portrait. We have instructions to follow, if I’m right, I have to put colors over 20% of what they gave me. My pannel was blue-green, so I have orange on the balloon, orange in triangles to have the eyes traveling; you also had to respect that. Those were constraints. For us artists, we are making ourselves known, it’s our goal. It’s being immortalized in Sherbrooke: we are from Sherbrooke, so it’s great.

When we came for our panels, in the premises of MURIRS, it was a light blue panel with white lines, but there was a white triangular geometric shape. I instantly imagined a swimmer with an elbow above his head, and who is breathing in because I used to swim and I really liked it, so the idea came to me to paint the swimmer.

It’s obviously a little different from what we usually do; I am currently doing mixed techniques and I have a floral theme. Here it was more figurative; I was going back in the past years, when I used to do really precise figurative, and the acrylic itself was much more liquid than what we generally use. There were also constraints of values; from light to dark, we had to respect the value of our panel and the color. So when I was working on the skin of the swimmer, I was making sure that it was bluish, broken enough so it wouldn’t stand out too much for the panel.

This is an interesting experience because it’s getting us out of the routine, it’s making us do different things, and it’s a beautiful experience: I loved it.

I thought about taking a monochrome panel, only blue, because I saw something in relation to water.

When I started painting, it changed because I have a young daughter who does gymnastics, and I started from a sort of final show for gymnasts of the Club de Gymnastique de Sherbrooke. I saw the show and all those little girls do gymnastics every week, every year, and some of them keep up. When they grow up they can dream of going to the Olympics. It’s so beautiful because it’s with their bodies, there’s no intermediary, no device… That’s what made it interesting to me. One of them is my daughter: I wanted to put her in the middle of this because she is the core of the desire to show gymnasts, the heart of my intention.

We didn’t know what the final work would look like, but we could still choose in relation to our taste because there were shapes and colors on the panel, when we start the painting, there are instructions to follow: the colors and the shapes that are already on the panel. We have to deal with it, and to manage to make a painting that will fit in a whole. Since we don’t know what this “whole” is, we have to comply.

It was a comeback on a mural after ten years of absence, I liked it a lot. It was also an interesting challenge because the panel was promising, but there were also many variations in the colors.

The criteria were quite strict; we had to respect the marriage of the black and red stripes that I had, for them to connect well with the others. I also tried to step out of my comfort zone by having a more contemporary approach than what I usually do, also allowing myself to emphasize on a family bond. I wanted to show my son’s passion for mountain biking, so I told myself “well, well, well…” I combined business with pleasure; I managed to create something that brought me back in a much more modern bosom - what I paint is traditional – in addition to having a family bond.