A Mural in Montreal
Recently we spoke to Alex, an Australian artist living in Montreal who decided to paint a large mural in honor of the democracy movement in Myanmar. More photos and Alex’s full Instagram post can be seen here. In our interview, Alex describes his several visits to the country, first as a tourist and later coming to support a school building project, where he also painted murals around the school grounds. So it was only natural that he would use his skill to show support from afar. The following excerpt describes the Alex’s motivation in more detail. One of the things I find valuable in his talk is the reminder that any one of us, no matter where we are and what our talents are, has some role to play in supporting the ongoing crisis. To hear more detail about Alex’s creative decisions when constructing this artwork, listen to the full interview here!
“I decided I’m going to paint a mural of some sort to bringing awareness to what’s going on.”
Alex: I was just on the other side of the world and seeing things happen. And I guess I have the power of painting as my way to express myself. I am living in Montreal, Canada, and I decided I’m going to paint a mural of some sort to bringing awareness to what's going on, because there is a really popular mural scene here in the city, and a lot of a lot of the artworks do get shared around quite a lot. So I hoped that it would get spread around.
Host: Right, so you made a mural based on some scenes and imagery of what was happening there. Can you do your best to describe what was in the mural that you created?
Alex: So it was me along with two other friends that assisted me. It's actually a coincidence. It wasn't until we actually started that I realized that the colors and the way that I broke it up, it came to represent the Myanmar flag! We have in the center with the green… I painted Bagan, as that landscape is just imprinted in my memory. Then I created these temples, and one of the temples I turned into the three finger salute that I was seeing everyone do. I turned it into a stone temple, just to give it a strength and a hope that people will prevail. And then in the sky, the script in the script is amazing!
Kyal Sin, she had on this shirt, ‘Everything will be okay.’ And so we translated that into Burmese, like writing across the sky. That is being written everywhere, with little rainbows all around them. And I just saw this kind of connection with that. I wrote in my description that it felt kind of wrong and ironic to write. But it's also hopeful… so we have that written in gold across the sky. And then in the front, in the section of the flag that is red, I have some imagery from the people. There's some people protesting doing the salute. I saw the shields that everyone had made, and they'd written ‘PEOPLE’ on it instead of ‘police.’ I just thought that was really creative.
Host: You do have like a mixture of hope and terror. And perhaps optimism all mixed in there. You have this aerial landscape of Bagan which looks like any picture. It's very reminiscent, and along with the pagodas, and then there is this three finger salute rising with that, but that's in the background. In the foreground, you have tear gas and riot police and then off to the right, you have Angel, Kyal Sin, this young woman who was killed early on in Mandalay. And so there is this kind of mix of all these different things going on at the same time, which is probably pretty authentic to how it feels there on the ground.
Alex: Yeah. I think I like what you just described. I thought the front was the present and the center is the past and the history of the people. And then the top layer was this hope for the future.
Host: Also, you have a series of red balloons going off into the distance. What does that represent?
Alex: The red balloons I chose to paint because because I saw some. I think it was a demonstration or some way of passing messages covertly by some of the protesters, where they were pushing balloons out of a truck. And the red was to represent Aung San Suu Kyi’s party. It does make a compositional element, because there's this smoke kind of coming from the same angle as the balloons. But also, balloons are kind of free, as you set them off into the sky. And there's a freedom too, so I think I painted them with the intention of giving them like this part of freedom, like guiding them and then entering the section of the sky.