A Reason to Stop

For a long time, when someone asked what I did, I said, “I paint murals.”

Thousands of square feet of paint on walls.

People took photos of them for social media.

Cities commissioned them.

Festivals invited me to make more.

Bright lights do little for me. Looking back, I remember far more of the small things that happened while I was painting.

A grandmother introducing herself because she walked past the wall every evening with her equally frail little dog, smoking long, thin French cigarettes.

Children arguing about whose turn it was to help.

Volunteers who stayed long after the day’s work had ended, choosing music on the Bluetooth speaker in the shade.

Neighbours meeting for the first time as colour spread across the wall.

These encounters are what I value most about the work.

The mural was never only an image.

It was permission to stop.

To participate.

To belong.

People often ask how long murals last.

Sometimes decades, sometimes a day. It’s a reasonable question, especially when you’ve watched someone spend weeks painting one.

I’ve watched painted walls fade while friendships remain. Children return years later remembering that they helped make something there.

These aren’t stories about paint, but about what paint made possible.

Those bits stick.

So much of my attention goes into making art work.

Then someone reminds me of an afternoon we spent together, or a small part they painted. Something stayed with them that I barely noticed, busy as I was with the wall.

As they tell it, I’m back there, noticing what I missed.

Overlapping footprints left in dusty ground

The afternoon grows larger.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what to put on a wall.

I can’t know who will stop, or what they’ll carry away from the time we spend there.

But I like to leave room for the good stuff.

Perhaps murals are not for walls, but for creating the conditions in which people encounter one another differently.

The wall simply gives that encounter somewhere to begin.

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