The House is a genuinely unique youth centre in St Austell, Cornwall. They are situated next to a skate park with ramps and features specifically designed for street skating. The designers also put in a wall for graffiti and street art and I was invited to paint on it this week by The House and Cornwall Council and make a permanent feature and benefit to the park.
I managed to get a great group of young people who hang out at The House and the skate park to help me prepare the wall for painting (quite hard work) and, as we scraped off paint and sanded the wall and enjoyed visits from the press, we talked about ideas and images to go on it.
The image is a response to the subject of the need for peace and respect. The planet shows that the issue is worldwide. There is a question mark in the eye/moon because there are questions in the picture. Some questions we couldn't answer so we decided to leave a majority of the picture open to interpretation.
They didn't mind the hard work at all, and it was hot on Monday!
On tuesday I got there at 5am to start so I could get a lot done before the park got busy but it was raining and it wasn't very interesting work waiting for the rain to stop! Luckily the Mayor of St Austell, Jill Trewhela, turned up with bacon sandwiches, flasks of tea and hot chocolate and great conversation.
The House opened at 10 and I got the chance to develop the ideas with some Monday's team and meet the DJs and dancers who were doing workshops there that day.
Finally got to start painting the wall at around 12pm and heard more press were on the way so I drew the outlines and gave everyone colours to paint, even the Mayor got involved with the painting and took lots of pictures. By the time the press arrived there was a lot of the image on the wall.
Great teamwork!
