Why Guido van Helten is drawn to the wall

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This was published 5 years ago

Why Guido van Helten is drawn to the wall

By Susan Chenery

​Lee Estes' weathered face looks out across the Nashville sky. He is 50 metres tall.

Australian mural artist Guido van Helten chose to immortalise the 92-year-old native Nashvillian on an abandoned silo because of his charitable work helping the families of prisoners.

 Artist Guido van Helten with his mural of deaf dancer, Anna Seymour, in Melbourne last year.

Artist Guido van Helten with his mural of deaf dancer, Anna Seymour, in Melbourne last year.Credit: Wayne Taylor

"He sort of embodies that generation of people from that area," van Helten says. "He volunteers every day and is really nice." Van Helten had been invited into The Nations community, which was built around a jail (opened in 1898) so that families could be close to their incarcerated loved ones. "This is a rapidly gentrifying community, the poorer people are being pushed out. To me he stands symbolic against the tide of gentrification."

The creation of each of van Helten's breathtaking, large-scale murals follows a similar process. He immerses himself in communities, takes photos, and then attempts to reflect their essence on unused, forgotten utilitarian buildings. He has done this across the world; many of his hyper realistic images depict people living in maginalised communities. "Whenever I do a painting it is always going to be about the people who surround it," he says.

Van Helten places the finishing touches on his mural on silos in Brim in north-western Victoria.

Van Helten places the finishing touches on his mural on silos in Brim in north-western Victoria.Credit: Paul Carracher

In Ecatepec, in Mexico, he responded to the culture of domestic violence and the high rate of female homicides by painting the faces of women on buildings.

When he painted inside the Chernobyl reactor, for the 30th anniversary of the nuclear accident, he had a time limit of six hours due to the risk of radiation exposure.

In Avdiivka, on the front line of eastern Ukraine, he worked wearing a bullet-proof vest, amid mortars and machine guns, to paint the face of local school teacher, Marina Marchenko, who has continued to teach during the ongoing war. In a storm he slid 40 metres down the scissor lift's spine to avoid being struck by lightning.

He has now turned his focus to small towns in America and, speaking from Iowa, is remarkably nonchalant about his artistic exploits. "Someone emails me about a project and I can't say no, I just go," he says. "The art is dictating where I go. I don't even think I have control over it any more, I just go where there is a wall. When I start I always think it is impossible but I just get myself up there and work it out."

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Van Helten's mural on Cleveland Street in Sydney's Redfern.

Van Helten's mural on Cleveland Street in Sydney's Redfern.Credit: Photographic

Van Helten grew up in Brisbane. His mother is the music journalist and author Gillian Wills, his stepfather the artist Mostyn Bramley-Moore. "As a child he was fiercely independent," Wills says. "He was expelled from a well-known private boys' school, he didn't fit in. Instead he truanted and spent his days hanging out with the homeless in the city. His close friends and sister call him the Mystery Man."

Van Helten studied print making at Southern Cross University, where he has since been named Alumni of the Year. He began his street art with graffiti using aerosol spray to paint portraits. "I learned everything from graffiti. It doesn't matter what your name is, it is your style in a public place," he says.

Van Helten working on his piece for Coombe Street south of Sydney.

Van Helten working on his piece for Coombe Street south of Sydney.Credit: Adam McLean

Driving across Australia he saw large, decommissioned sites gathering dust and itched to paint on them. "The sort of architecture which is just totally functional and has no decorative features," he says.

He became one of Australia's most sought after street artists in 2015 after painting a mural exploring regional communities on 30-metre-high former grain silos in the town of Brim in western Victoria. The small community, which has a population of 100 people, became a tourist destination overnight. The Brim Silos Art Project was among the finalists of the Sulman Prize in 2016. "I arrived in a van filled with paint and hung around talking to people trying to get a cultural identity. I feel that an artwork should have a reason for being there, otherwise it just becomes decoration."

I don't even think I have control over it anymore, I just go where there is a wall.

Last May, van Helten painted school children on silos at Coonalpyn in regional South Australia because "they represent the future". With a population of 300, where shops had been boarded up, new businesses started opening in Coonalpyn to cater for the increased tourist traffic passing by to see the work. "If you put something there that didn't exist before," he says, "you can very cleanly measure the way it changes a place."

Prior to the project in Brim, van Helten had been "floating around the North Atlantic" painting in Iceland, Greenland, the Ukraine, Finland and Estonia. In Iceland in 2015, he painted a ship with a woman wrapped in a wool sweater. The paintings, he says "belong to the people of the place, they take ownership of it, it becomes part of their space. I am trying to create a sense of identity that belongs to all of the people in that place. They make up their own stories about it."

In May of this year, he painted a mural of Yvonne Hogan on a silo at Portland, in the Central Tablelands of NSW. Hogan had worked at the cement works for many years. "Everyone I spoke to there had some connection with these buildings," he says. "A lot of times the town is built around these structures and is there because of these industries. That is what I have been discovering everywhere I go."

Van Helten first takes dozens of photographs, and then he studies the space. His photorealistic work consistently uses a soft palette of greys and browns. "I take in the location, the surface matter, the environment. I very meticulously try to match the colour of the concrete so I can use it as much as possible in the work. When you get it right it starts to become part of the wall, turning the building into a statue."

He starts a mural at the very top, on a crane. "That is a focal point so I like to get it looking good first and then it comes together. But it is scary to go that high."

Vice chancellor of Southern Cross University Adam Schumacher says van Helten "has got a skill in that he can be right up next to it and it is fuzzy up close. But two kilometres away it is as sharp as a tack."

As he travels from place to place, painting on walls, using art to tell people's stories, van Helten says he feels immensely lucky. "It is exciting and very beautiful. I am privileged to do this."

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