Our new mural now it’s finally finished
At long flippin’ last - our new mural is finished!
Scroll down to see what took us so long…
Our Murals are one of the many things that move our Club forward & set us apart from all other places. After a Summer of planning in 2010, work was finally started on our brand new & most ambitious Mural ever…
It was to go on the massive empty wall at the top of the front stairs, just outside the main doors to the upstairs Club, where the Orangutan used to hang before he moved downstairs. the plan was, it should be our finest ever work by miles & it completely blow people’s minds.
We decided to present it in the style of a Victorian war painting, along the lines of a ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ type vibe. We didn’t however, seek to glorify the dubious & pointless activities of the nonsensical, imperialist, european armies of yesteryear…
Instead it was painted on a similarly massive scale, but was to be a scene from nature, depicting real evolution, meaningful violence & feature only wild animals…
At over 7 metres long & nearly 2.5 metres high it’s a big, big mural & without doubt this would have been be a truly massive undertaking for any talented artist. As with all murals in the Club it was painted by someone who actually works here, as we never use outsiders.
The lucky chappie tasked with this epic mission was Teal Griffin, who had worked with us behind the bar at the Club for yonks.
He is the dude who painted the outstanding, massive Charles Darwin Mural inside the upstairs Club near the space invader. A photo of which you can see here below…
He also did our box office backdrop for us earlier that Summer, incorporating all our logos. That was a very constrained & linear job & was a proper pain in the arse for him to get exactly right. Lining it all up spot on took forever & we may yet tweak it even more.
This one was much more up his street & a proper challenge for him to enjoy, far more suited to a man of his genius artistic eye & skills. The way it shaped up in the planning process it all came together & couldn’t really have grown from scratch, any more organically.
We hung out a lot, plotting the look of it, making the plan & generally talking over the ins & outs required for the creation of this large scale, epic real life animal drama. It was a bit like constructing a movie storyboard & was really, really exciting.
As you can see from these initial sketches we developed, we decided on a view of the Mara River as Zebra & Wildebeast make the annual migratory crossing.
All the other major stars on the plains had a role to play & Lion, Hyena, Leopard, Vulture, Crocodile, Hunting Dog & all the gang were planned to be in attendance. This was an A-list cast we put together.
We took a lot of time (as you must if you want something like this to come off as a bomb) to research all of the headlining animals, studying David Attenborough DVDs & also a load of old 19th century war oil paintings for the style & fashion of the piece.
You would be surprised just how much background work goes into plotting this kinda mad thing, but we were certain the jaw dropping end result would more than justify it all.
This is a vision of ’survival of the fittest’ on a grand scale. It’s very, very brutal indeed & depicts nature at it most raw, moving, exciting, natural & meaningful.
We aimed to make it even more brutal & violent than any of those 19th century war paintings, whose intricate, detailed, overblown style we based it on. What we were creating is the exact moral opposite of that Victorian fashion, of using art to glorify suffering. Our art depicts violence born of hunger, raw instinct & survival. It’s the polar opposite of self righteous imperialists, wanking off on images of war for greed.
Many of those old oil paintings have a really dramatic take on fear, transmitted best on the frantic faces & in the wide, terrified eyes of the charging cavalry horses they depict.
We also worked on capturing that, within the eyes of our Wildebeast & Zebra cast.
It slowly took shape over the initial few weeks & we had originally planned to have it completed by late September 2010, but as they tend to, things got busy & when that happens, not everything always goes according to plan.
Which of course it didn’t as its now already late 2011…
We can’t imagine why it took so long…? But here is a little snap of a now famous artist, back at Halloween 2010… As you can clearly see, here is Teal off his rocker at Halloween, dressed up as a little robot, wondering how he hadn’t managed to find the time to finish the picture yet…?!
One thing is certain, now that he has finished it, it’s a total show stopper & almost too amazing to believe.
We whacked some more photos (below) up to show the initial progress over the folowing days… then we realised it was gonna go on for ever & changed folowing ‘days’ to ’ months’ instead & rather than lie.
Three days in…
Head on view…
Five days in…
Head on view…
Early background washes…
Showing the first signs of the bend in the river…
Looking at the middle…
Starting to come together…
Bones….
Then meat starts to go on……
Into the water…
Whoops…!
That’s gotta hurt…
Quality lion dinner action…
Quality vulture dinner action….
Now all his mates want some…
We even got Ronnie the Club dog in the picture, chilling with some of her distant big eared relatives…
Only a year late, the whole kaboodle is complete now, it’s had it’s coat of varnish & shall now remain forever, what is to date, the greatest of the WHQ murals.
Below are some extras shots to show you how it all turned out, but to really feel the scale of it all you gotta come & see it in person.
No one is safe….
Mrs Lion hates the Hyenas…
He’s really mean…
All in at once…
So close..!
About one third of the action…
It’s a great mural & you can’t possibly miss it, so be sure to check it out next time you visit us for a fun night out.
Next up - Aretha Franklin done in the style of the Queen on a massive kinda 12 foot high postage stamp, as ‘Queen of Soul’. This will go up as part of our current renovation of the downstairs Club that is happening now. It will be over in the corner, where the massive window used to be.
At WHQ dreams never end & planning that next epic mural has already started…