In my last glaze firing there was a small vase painted by Eric Metcalfe. He is having fun applying his boldly coloured designs to a 3D form.

When I dropped it off at his home in  Mount Pleasant’s Western Front he showed me a series of gouache paintings which he says have all evolved from his experience painting on my oval plates. The result of the series is that he has been asked to enlarge one of them into a mural. The image selected uses the orange, red, turquoise and black that he likes to use on the clay with underglazes.

Eric has sent me a little explanation of the work and there are some photos of the stages in painting the large piece, with the help of two young artists. One of them, Jacqui Ross, has joined us for a ‘painting raid’ several times. She is a Western Front curator.

Gill, It’s interesting for me to see this evolution starting with ceramic painting and in colour choices morphing into painting of a large mural… (3 panels of 4 x 8 a trypditch.) I did 25 gouache studies before narrowing it down the choice to ‘stellar’ using a simple palette of red,blue,yellow and black My assistants were Jacqui Ross and Nathaniel Wong, two very talented young painters who were wonderful to work with on this project for the Burrard Arts Foundation. Christian Chan is the president of BAF whose family’s building is the Burrard Building on Georgia and Burrard. The mural will find its new home there when it is installed in the lobby. Eric

I look forward to seeing this arresting mural once it is installed.

August 22nd 2014

Here are two photos of the mural installed.