Artist James K-M and Joe Clare pose in front of the mural. (Photo by Ron Snider)
By Connie Adair
As the saying goes, everything happens for a reason. One day sales rep Joe Clare of Re/Max North in Edmonton woke up with an image of colourful plumes of smoke rising from a building flashing in his mind. The image inspired him to commission a 16 x 16-foot mural that employed homeless people to create and help brighten an inner city neighbourhood.
Slightly “nervous” about the image he pictured, Clare said he told a friend about it over dinner. “I explained the image and said I thought it might be a mural,” says Clare, who was catching up with Carol in Vancouver after the two friends had lost touch for many years. Coincidentally, Carol’s husband, whom Clare had never met, is an artist who goes by the name James K-M. Although James K-M creates only smaller paintings, Clare commissioned him to create the large public mural. “I wouldn’t let him say no,” says Clare, who returned to Edmonton with firm instructions from the artist about how to prep the wall for the mural.
Clare hired a crew of homeless people to help with scaffolding and to scrape the wall. The crew then applied a yellow base coat, as well as a large square of red. The work took about three weeks and every worker was paid and fed.
James K-M and an assistant then travelled to Edmonton, taking six days to apply the blue symbols to the mural based on a 2X2-foot painting the artist created in 2007. The painting and the mural are named Free Rain, an “intended play on the notion of a liberating and free-rein of metaphysical perception. But I also see the abstract shapes in the painting as rain-like….” says James K-M in his artist’s statement.
Clare says in another turn of happenstance, the colours of the mural are the same as the colourful plumes of smoke he first imagined. And, Clare says he “knew intuitively that it wouldn’t rain until the mural was finished. As the last brush stroke was made, it started to rain. Later that night there were tornado-like conditions and during the unveiling in July 2009, it rained.”
From start to finish, everything about the mural project was an “otherworldly experience. It was mystical. Everyone from the homeless to the artist were highly focused. It was a most harmonious project,” says Clare, who owns the commercial building the mural brightens. The renovated building houses retail tenants, two lofts and affordable housing.
So why did he spend about $15,000 on a public mural? “Real estate agents should be advocates for neighbourhoods,” he says.
And business-wise, he says real estate professionals should remember that “the amount of goodwill (created by) a community-based project is greater than any advertising or pen will give them.”
For more information about the mural, visit www.strathearnmural.net, or email Joe Clare at [email protected]
