Verena Marmion painted received a comission from the Perth tango club in June 2011. The tango club stipulated that the mural is simple and blends in to the background of the club to add ambience. For that reason you will find features of the actual room painted into the mural series. These includes replicas of the existing windows, round tables with red table cloths and the street lamps.;xNLx;;xNLx;Perth Tango club Members shared with artist Verena Marmion their Buenos Aires photographs featuring grand old turn of the century buildings and memories to create this painting. Verena who had not been to Buenos Aires requested that the tango community share with here their impressions from which she created a collage and then a design for the Perth tango club Mural. ;xNLx;;xNLx; Verena primarily considers herself to be a watercolourist. Therefore one interesting feature of this wall is that most of the mural was painted with watered down washes of the paint.The mural was painted with housepaint. The various shades of colour were all mixed by hand from pure tints.
After listening to the Tango club's requirements for their mural, I came up with the following design for their approval.
I will never forget the first time I opened the town hall doors and at the end of the hall was a massive 12x12 foot blank wall. I felt sudden empathy for my students who would report feeling intimidated by a blank canvas. It wasn't until that day I could relate to them. On top of this I had the prospect of climbing about on a 2 mt high scaffolding. Of course, by the end of 5 months this was second nature to me. My first step was drawing out the window frame and matching it to the surrounding wall to create the illusion of a window. If you look closely at this image you will see notice the chalk lines on the wall radiating from the centre. With this I established the basis for one point perspective, which the street scene is based upon.
After the initial chalk and pencil sketch I started with the sky. I started off with the sky, Since the walls of the hall are yellow i chose shades of yellow, orange and pink. It could be either the sunset, getting ready for a nights dancing, or a sunrise after a long night dancing- this is up to the viewers interpretation. On this section the paint is the thickest taking on an almost expressionistic quality. I enjoyed this part immensely but it was challenging blending the colour before the paint dries.
Once the sky was down, I blocked in the buildings. This was don working from the centre to the edges of the window. The buildings themselves are mostly made up of light washes. The dark windows I placed on top of this.
After creating the buildings I had the challenging job of creating the reflections on the wet street. Getting a mirror image of the buildings above, while maintaining transparency, was more cognitively challenging than I first expected.
This mural series had several parts. To compliment the cafe window I painted replicas of the existing lesser town hall windows on the opposite walls. Through the windows I placed flowering Jacarandas to match the main mural and old fashioned street lamps like those in the actual club.
Over the four months I was painting the mural the mural hidden. It was kept under tarps so we could have a grand opening. This is a picture from that night. I think the mural looks best in the evening light with a crowded dance floor in front of it.
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