Andrew Paul

Another Brush On The Wall | Vancouver artist K-M at the 95th Avenue mural.

STRATHEARN • Public Art

A new mural unveiled last Sunday brings new life to a building with a dark past.

“This building was a derelict building,” says real estate agent Joe Clare. “It housed prostitutes, drug addicts, and a fencing operation about 10 years ago. I bought it under foreclosure.”

Clare felt that he owed it to the neighbourhood to bring a little colour to the drab corner at 9206-95 Ave. 

Six months ago, he contacted Vancouver painter James K-M after the idea to create a 256-foot-square mural came to him in an early-morning vision.

“I woke up in the morning and saw these colours kind of oozing out of the building in my mind’s eye,” Clare says, “and then it sort of manifested itself into a kind of a mural.”

K-M was more than eager to get on board and spent the week prior to the unveiling bringing the mural to fruition with the help of the community, including six workers Clare hired from Bissell Centre to scrape and prep the wall.

The painting is a larger version of a previous work of K-M’s titled Free Rain that depicts raindrops moving in four directions. However, the artist doesn’t mind if his audience reaches a different conclusion. “People see bicycle chain links, other people see bones and some see tribal masks,” he says.

Strathearn residents have taken kindly to the mural. “There’s been all of this natural spontaneous reactions from ‘wow’ to ‘oh my god,” he says.