Mural Locations
Tanya Pixie Johnson created this mural on the back of the Community Futures building for the 2020 Nelson International Mural Festival.
“It is my intention that this reference will create stylistic dialogue with other Art Deco design and architectural features in the city. The composition includes two cat-like sentinels and the suggestion of arches or doorways, water and tree or plant-like forms
These ideas are stylized to meet the design parameters proposed by the client.”
Sandeep Johal created “One Day” on the side of the parkade for the 2020 Nelson International Mural Festival.
Created from the 2021 Nelson International Mural Festival on the Cedar Street retaining wall.
“Kai Cabödyna’s practice is rooted within returning to natural rhythms, dethroning patriarchal conditioning, cultivating community, exploring collaborative projects and evolving cultural paradigms. Overlapping and communicating through various mediums allows for his eclectic and adaptable process to reflect the way nature orchestrates it’s patterns, rhythms and flows.
Toronto-based artist Steph Payne created this mural for the 2021 Nelson International Mural Festival behind the Bigby Place building, near Superior Lighting and Bath.
“Steph Payne is a Venezuelan-Canadian Artist, Designer, & Creative Director with a diverse career arc in visual arts, mural production and experiential space design.”
PJ Gilhuly created “Raven Haven” for the 2021 Nelson International Mural Festival in the first-floor stairwell of the parkade.
Toner created “Nelson Spotlight” for the 2021 Nelson International Mural Festival. The piece features Streetcar #23, the Hume Hotel (before it’s renovation), the Courthouse, and Touchstones Museum.
Located in the parking lot facing side of Dr. Kelly Davidoff Family Dentistry, Bacon used his spare paint from “Harmony” to create this quick piece.
“Canadian painter and internationally acclaimed graffiti artist, Alexander Bacon, was born and raised in Toronto and has become a renowned mural artist with over 20 years of experience. Using spray paint as the main medium, Bacon’s work has evolved towards deconstructing traditional spray graffiti techniques to create an abstract style while preserving letters’ shapes. The technique behind his work presents a unique painting style where he produces soft color transitions, blending abstract forms with realism and expressionism.”
Harmony is located on the Highway-facing side of Dr. Kelly Davidoff Family Dentistry, painted by Bacon for the 2021 Nelson International Mural Festival.
“Canadian painter and internationally acclaimed graffiti artist, Alexander Bacon, was born and raised in Toronto and has become a renowned mural artist with over 20 years of experience. Using spray paint as the main medium, Bacon’s work has evolved towards deconstructing traditional spray graffiti techniques to create an abstract style while preserving letters’ shapes. The technique behind his work presents a unique painting style where he produces soft color transitions, blending abstract forms with realism and expressionism.”
“At the beginning of the ’90s, Ankh started doing graffiti on the walls of his beautiful native city of Grenoble, nestled at the foot of the Alps.
It is this mode of expression that led him to the benches of a graphic school.
Mastering these newfound institutional techniques, he gradually transposed his pictorial and graphic work to painting, without ever breaking the link to the graffiti culture that motivated this progression.”
This mural was created by Ric Gendron and assistants in 2022 on the side of Pharmasave Nelson.
“Ric Gendron is a “paint slinger” who creates expressive artworks that blend traditional Indigenous imagery with bold colors fields. As a member of the Arrow Lakes Band (Sinixt), he creates expressionist, strikingly colorful images that chronicle his experience, memory, history, journeys and identity. Gendron studied art at Cornish College of the Arts, the Eastern Washington University and in 1983 received his art degree from Spokane Falls Community College.”
Montreal-based artist Dodo Ose painted this mural on the side of Civic Auto for the 2022 Nelson International Mural Festival.
“DODO lives his Art as a great adventure, where one feeds the other and vice versa.
His painting is the reflection of His experience. He is a visual poet whose mission is to break the boundaries between dreams and realities. It remains optimistic and aims to hold the viewer’s attention to direct him to a moment of reflection, like he is living a daydream.It’s also a way to transpose emotions by creating a bridge between conscious and unconscious.”
Damian John created this mural on the Vernon Street retaining wall next to the Salvation Army (down the stairs) for the Nelson International Mural Festival in 2022.
“Damian loves art as a way of saying something, anything! It can be important, mundane, fantastic, colourful, terrible, quiet or loud. It is through this voice that he believes some of our most beautiful messages are relayed to one another. As such, he is always working to create story through his art in line, colour, and composition.”
Turbo Bambi created this mural for the 2022 Nelson International Mural Festival on the side of the Nelson Leaf’s Recycling Centre.
“Blending the lines from backcountry to canvas, Bambi’s passion for the outdoors feeds her desire to create. Immersed in the snow-surf-skate culture, her work ranges from an eccentric & humoristic take on street art to a minimalistic approach. As a thrill-seeking mixed media artist, Bambi’s process is defined by the motto “Shred & Create”.”
STYNA created this mural for the 2022 Nelson International Mural Festival on the roof of Kootenay Lake Hospital’s emergency department. The wall is visible from view street, as well as visible to the patients in the hospital’s palliative care ward.
“Wild Geese” is inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”.
“Christina Huynh is an illustrator and muralist based in Western Sydney, Australia that paints under the name STYNA. Her art practice involves creating murals, illustrations and picture books from differing mediums of watercolour, ink and pen to acrylic and aerosol.
Jesse Campbell is a Métis visual artist and strength athlete. His ancestry comes from St. Boniface and Waterhen lake MB on his Moms side and from Scotland and England on his Dads. Jesse has been painting murals since 2010 and ditched a career in the sciences to work full-time in the arts in 2018.
“With the Butterfly Effect, we have these small reverberations that sort of magnify, and create a much bigger impact. And I think about that with species, and species loss. In this piece I want to sort of depict recollection, recollecting our place within the land, our past, and our tentative future. I do that by reintroducing these flowers and the native species that go with them.” – Jesse Campbell
The piece is an ode to blue skies! The sky in Nelson really inspired me. When I first arrived, I talked to the festival organizers and several people who’ve lived here all their lives, and they were all telling me how lucky I was during my visit because the sky wasn’t smoky. Since I got here, the sky has been a perfect blue the whole time and I couldn’t imagine this beautiful place any other way.
What it says on the wall is “may the skies forever stay blue”, over and over again. It’s sort of like a wish, that with climate change and rapidly changing weather everywhere, the hope is that we have blue sky days like these over and over again; that things stay this way. I used a lot of shades of blue in it; the majority of the shades are sky blues, so if you take a photo of the wall, even at different times of day, some part of the wall is always matching the sky.
“This mural is inspired by Toronto, Canada and Mother Nature. On the front there is a mountain in the shape of Mother Nature’s face, she is smiling and resting peacefully with flowers and trees all over her. Her hair wraps to the right side, transforming into a flow of lines, swirls and more flowers. Toronto’s famous white squirrel is there as well. She is munching on an acorn and being as cute as she always is. Summer scenario on the front is changing into Autumn, as the mural wraps to the left. There are maple and oak leafs flying through the sky. It moves into a night, where floral design frames a special guest, Racoonie. He is startled to be caught playing with a little yellow duckie, a reference to the World’s largest rubber duck’s appearance in Toronto, 2017. This is a little tribute to it, since it wasn’t able to return to Toronto this year.”
Located on the northeast corner of College and Elizabeth Streets, ‘March of the Suffragettes’ displays five figures in Victorian-era dresses and hats with sashes across their outfits. On the approach to Women’s College Hospital, on a street also called Dr. Emily Stowe Way, this Signal Box reminds passers-by of the events related to the writing and enacting of bills, acts and other legal pathways in the ongoing fight for gender equality in this country, fought by many, notably the aforementioned Dr. Stowe, an icon in Canada’s suffrage movement. This signal box reminds us, that by not being dedicated just to Dr. Stowe but to the actions of the many, that history making events occur through the actions of the many, not the one.
Vicky Bilbily’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Bell Box displays the glass-covered interior of a robot’s brain and forehead, presumably asleep. The robot’s large eyes are open, looking to the left of the viewer, but their brain – a light blue semicircle circle – is filled with ten sheep connected to each other with a dark blue lines. The robot’s brain is connected to their body with light blue lines, reminiscent of a circuit board.
Ghazaleh Rastgar’s ‘Cyclist’ Bell Box depicts a painted side-view of a figure with long black hair, yellow pattern pants and a red shirt cycling on a sunny day. The sun’s dotted rays shine on the cyclist, as well as two bushes that they cycle past.
Found under the bridge just east of the Lawrence and McCowan intersection Elicser Elliott, a local artist, painted this massive part graffiti, part abstract portrait mural in 2018. The upper half of the mural shows ten figures sitting in a tree-filled area. Some listening, perhaps to nature, or perhaps to the figure in the middle…
Robyn Lightwalker’s ‘Chickadee’ Bell Box displays the fun and liveliness of the chickadee, a bird local to this Bell Box’s location. This Box features a chickadee sitting atop a branch, which covers a neon pink expanding flower. The Bell Box’s background, dark blue with neon green dots, creates an exciting atmosphere for this hedge-backed area.
Featuring a dark blue background that wraps around the signal box, its front face displays two sunflowers, painted in miraculous yellow with strong black stems and leaves, surrounded by smaller white petaled flowers. Its back face shows one large sunflower, while its sides show three white doves on each side, separated by black hearts.
“Corner of Craven and Gerrard in Little India. (…) Huge thanks to the @leslievilledanceandmusic for having me adorn the side of your building with my flowers. Thanks to my dad for helping me do the hard labour of getting two coats of primer on this wall and multiple coats of all these blocks of colour. A dream project indeed.”
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