THE STORY AFTER THE WALL

Some murals are finished when the last can is put down. Others are simply waiting for the story to continue.

My return to Jugiong Public School was about doing exactly that, completing the wraparound of a shed I’d painted on a previous visit and extending the artwork into one continuous scene.

This time, the students had plenty of ideas about what they wanted included. After talking through their suggestions, we landed on a horse, a waratah and a kelpie, elements that could work naturally within the existing mural while allowing the story to continue around the building.

One of the challenges was connecting two very different worlds. Pink and orange hues gradually move around the shed towards blues and an underwater scene, with the transition designed to feel seamless rather than like two separate murals meeting at a corner.

Even the weather managed to have a small say in the final piece. While I was painting, I noticed the direction of the wind and began using it to influence the movement within the mural. Bubbles drift out from the underwater scene on one side, slowly becoming clouds as they travel around the shed. It became a simple way of connecting the two environments, with the real world outside helping shape the world I was painting.

But the story didn’t quite finish there.

I was at Franklin, working on another mural and actually writing this story, when Lisa, one of the teachers from Jugiong, unexpectedly turned up to see me. She arrived carrying a little bag of local goodies: some honey from the area, Worcestershire sauce and a gift voucher for the local pub I’d visited while I was there.

Then she told me something I loved. The students had already named the new characters in the mural: Bubbles the Kelpie, Beauty the horse and Beast the cow.

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One comment in particular stuck with me. One of the students, Braden, had looked at the scene and said, “The horse is coming in to stir up the cows.” It made me laugh because it was such a country thing to say. Growing up on a farm myself, it immediately took me back to being a kid. It sounded exactly like something I might have said at his age.

Maybe that’s one of the nicest things about painting for schools. You can arrive with an idea of what a mural might become, but once it’s finished, it doesn’t really belong to you anymore. The kids give the characters names, make up their own stories and find things within it that you could never have planned.

I went back to Jugiong to complete a mural, but somewhere along the way, the students started the next part of the story themselves.