Looking up an office lobby: a giant black-and-white athlete stretches across the ceiling over coloured shapes.

Projects

’76

Montreal, Canada

Interior environmental mural

The 1976 Montreal Olympics remain one of those civic moments the city still carries around — ambition, spectacle, controversy and collective memory, all tangled together.

For a private workplace in downtown Montreal, I approached that history through its visual traces: archival photographs, newspaper images and the flowing graphic language surrounding the Games.

The mural extends across a large ceiling and neighbouring walls near the building’s athletic facilities. It forms part of a wider art programme featuring local and Canadian artists throughout the tower.

The cover of the 1976 Montreal Olympics Arts and Culture Program, rainbow ribbons rising beneath the title.

I spent hours with photographs from the Games, particularly black-and-white newspaper images. I fell in love with their grain, the movement of bodies and the visual texture of those brief moments caught in print.

Curved, ribbon-like forms drawn from an Olympic poster became the connecting thread, carrying the imagery across changes in surface and direction.

The composition remained relatively spare. Within it, I had room to give the figures an unusual degree of attention.

Before: a bare concrete corridor of elevators and stacked materials.

The building was still a construction site. During production, I worked alone, with access that allowed me to stay as long as I wanted.

I had nearly as much time as I could ask for — a rare circumstance on a mural project. I could stay with a passage, revisit it, refine a gesture or work through an anatomical problem without constantly calculating what needed to be sacrificed to the schedule.

I don’t think I had ever put this much controlled detail into figurative rendering at this scale.

It was a real pleasure to give that part of my practice room.

The lobby transformed: black-and-white athletes, one in a USA singlet, spread over walls, ceiling and elevator doors.

Ceiling jobs are brutal, honestly.

Much of the painting demanded sustained overhead work from scaffolding. The physical effort came with a technical challenge: rendering bodies across surfaces that would be seen from below, at changing angles, as people moved through the space.

You don’t stand in front of this mural — you move through it.

Having time meant I could attend to those relationships as carefully as the individual figures. The simplicity of the composition held a considerable amount of close work.

A frieze of black-and-white runners and swimmers races across coral, gold and teal bands.

While project budgets are crucial, time has its own effect on what I can achieve. The longer I stay with a painting, the further I can take its rendering and the more attention I can give its details.

This project let me experience that flow with unusual freedom. The hours were demanding, but I could afford to keep working until a passage felt resolved.

There is something strange about so much care going into a work that remains largely invisible to the city around it. One of Montreal’s most public historical moments now occupies a workplace accessible only to those permitted inside.

For the people who pass beneath it, the images become part of an everyday route. For me, the painting remains a record of what having enough time made possible.

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