A white Kermode bear tramps across the Lions Gate Bridge in a supernatural vision of Vancouver.
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The St. Elmo Hotel in Strathcona has had its share of graffiti tags. So the new owner of the 1911 building at 439 Campbell Ave. decided to try something new: a giant mural on the laneway, where most of the graffiti occurs.
Artist Leslie Phelan has been at work on it since late October, taking advantage of a break in the rain. Her mural is bright and colourful, the embodiment of the old tourist slogan “Supernatural British Columbia.”
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It features stylized renditions of the North Shore mountains, Burrard Inlet, a sailboat, orcas, cypress trees, the white Kermode spirit bear and the Lions Gate Bridge.
It’s quite a change for the gloomy alley, which doesn’t get a lot of sun.
“My favourite colour in the world is emerald, and so most of the mountains are in a beautiful emerald shade that I found, lined with kind of a soccer field green,” said Phelan.
“I like to mix in really bold, punchy colours, like that race-car-striped red (on the sailboat), next (to) a slightly more coral version. The sun is kind of a gorgeous banana yellow that stands out next to the turquoise (sky).
“The bridge I’ve painted in a bit of a shamrock green, that aged green feel. The Kermode bear, the main shade I have named whisper beige. It’s kind of my colour that I paint on a lot of things, (such as the) furniture in my house.”
Her enthusiasm for the colours is matched by her enthusiasm for the project, which is her first big solo mural since she moved to Vancouver from Toronto a year ago.
She’s been painting murals and doing commercial artwork back east for almost a decade. But years of executing renditions of the CN Tower started to get to her.
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“I told my husband, ‘Honey, I really think we need to go where they’ll request me to paint beautiful things,’ ” she said with a laugh.
So they moved west. En route they came across a good sign: a Kermode bear by the side of the Trans-Canada Highway between Lake Louise, Alta., and Field.
“It was June and it was beautiful,” she recounts. “It was in the sunshine eating dandelions, it was the most beautiful thing.”
This explains how the rare white bear made its way into a mural that otherwise is all Vancouver. In this case, the bear is truckin’ across the Lions Gate Bridge into Stanley Park and downtown.
The bear isn’t all that white though: Phelan painted it as she saw it by the side of the highway.
“The colours that were jumping out at me were pinky browns and stuff,” she said. “I don’t know if it was dirty fur. But they weren’t white, there were colours happening.”
The mural is two storeys high, 15 metres long and curves at the bottom, because the St. Elmo is built into a bit of a hill.
The St. Elmo is a small, three-storey building wedged into a 40-by-50-foot lot on the lane at Campbell. There are two houses beside it on Campbell in what would normally be combined in one lot with the St. Elmo — in the 1890s and early 1900s builders often built multiple buildings on corner lots in Strathcona and were able to subdivide them into small lots.
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St. Elmo is the patron saint of sailors, and the SRO hotel has long been home to sailors or workers near the waterfront. But it’s being updated into “micro-suites.”
The new owners — listed in property records as Elmo Soup Holdings — are interested in giving the property a “really nice facelift,” said Melissa Willey of DPM rental management, which looks after the St. Elmo. “(The mural) is the first phase in a long set of upcoming upgrades for the location.”
Phelan said people walking by have been appreciative of the mural.
“What’s wonderful is (Raycam) community centre is right there (across the street), and the kids were looking at a lot of graffiti before,” she said. “Now they have this big colourful mural.”
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