Eric Murphy, Centretown News
Metcalfe’s new mural shows a silhouette of the downtown skyline.
One of Centretown’s front doors now boasts a glossy new face.
Tucked beneath the 417 just south of the nature museum, the eastern wall of the Metcalfe underpass has been concrete-grey for most of its history.
Today, an eight-foot tall mural runs along the sidewalk. Painted by local artist Nicole Bélanger, the mural features the Ottawa city logo beside a stylized silhouette of the downtown skyline, flanked by white stripes shooting into the air like spotlights.
Across the street, the still bare western wall is set to be painted by September. While the current mural is based off of a City of Ottawa design, the second painting will be designed through community consultation to represent Centretown.
Together, the walls are the first glimpse of Centretown more than 1000 drivers see every day.
“It’s a very busy underpass, and all these underpasses are pretty ugly,” says Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes. “So this is a great improvement as a welcoming to the downtown.”
To the left of the skyline, the new mural features an increasingly familiar multicolored maple leaf, the symbol for Canada’s upcoming 150th celebrations.
Beside it reads “be here for Canada’s big year,” in both English and in French. Serving as an advertisement for the Canadian sesquicentennial, the painting may be one of many projects Ottawa’s 2017 task force has planned for the downtown core.
“They’re just starting,” says Holmes. “We are accumulating a budget for 2017. So this is just part of that planning.”
A higher budget for art could be good news for Bélanger, who painted both the Metcalfe mural and a nearly identical one on the Bronson and Riverside underpass.
“Ottawa needs more murals,” says Bélanger without a moment’s hesitation. As a contributing artist for the crime prevention project “Paint it Up!” she’s no stranger to creating beautiful wall art. With the project, which encourages at risk youth to participate in creating murals that are meant to inspire them and deter graffiti. Through “Paint it Up!” she’s led the creation of murals all across the capital, including the mural lining the March Road tunnel underpass in Kanata.
Even though the Metcalfe painting wasn’t based on her design, Bélanger says she’s pleased with the final product.
“It’s very clean, crisp,” she says. “The colours are fun, the silhouette works.”
Bélanger is particularly happy that the city chose to fund a mural instead of putting up another banner.
“It has a bit of a 1950s feel, where advertising used to be painted on businesses,” she says. “If it had been a computer generated image, it wouldn’t have that feel. It still has that painterly quality to it.”
Aside from making the Metcalfe Street underpass more attractive and advertising the sesquicentennial, the mural is also meant to deter graffiti, as underpasses are particularly vulnerable to tagging.
Diane Holmes is particularly aware of this issue. She says that the city of Ottawa provides the Bank St. BIA, Somerset BIA, and other downtown business improvement associations with $10,000 annually to remove graffiti. This is a price tag the organizations usually have to match themselves to stay on top of tagging.
“They all spend a lot of their money,” says Holmes. “It’s a constant problem.”
Both the Metcalfe mural and the Riverside painting are scheduled to have a community mural painted across the street by summer’s end.
Bélanger has been shortlisted for the Riverside Drive painting. No artist has yet been announced for the second half of the Metcalfe project.