Struck by the view looking south up the hill from Baker Street, artist Eric Kirkwood was looking for a discarded board or piece of wood to paint the scene on when he found something better.
“I just started painting on the box,” he explains, referencing a green electrical box in the parking lot between Wydham and Baker Streets.
“I figured, well if I get in trouble, I’ll just paint over it.”
Instead, with the encouragement of passersby and workers in nearby buildings, “one thing led to another,” and soon he had covered three sides of the box in still life scenes of the surrounding streetscape embellished with fanciful additions.
“It’s really cool to paint on,” Kirkwood explains. “It’s a smooth surface which oil painters like.”
At one point, he was approached by police who he thought might shut the impromptu public art project down. But when he showed the officer what he was doing, Kirkwood said the officer told him to keep going and gave him his card.
After completing the Baker Street parking lot box in July, in September he started a new project on an electrical box in the square on the south side of the intersection Quebec and Wyndham Streets.
“I’ve been living in Guelph my whole life, so I figured I might as well just celebrate it a little,” Kirkwood says of his inspiration. “There is no real hidden agenda, just paint and see what people do.”
Over the course of several weeks working in the square, Kirkwood got free meals from Moe’s hot dogs, regular access to the bathroom at Capistrano and even some money for paint from the Downtown Guelph Business Association.
“I think it’s great,” says Marty Williams, executive director of Downtown Guelph Business Association. “They’re doing this sort of thing in all kinds of other cities, just taking the sort of banal bits of the urban built form and making them a bit more exciting. He’s done a great job and we’re happy to be supporters.”
As for Kirkwood, though the cold weather has slowed him down, he’s become “addicted” to the challenge of capturing “real life” on his newfound medium of choice.
“I might still do more,” he says. “But I’m thinking smaller ones.”
