Mural’s easy on the eye

STREET ART Talented artist Vanessa Power creates Abbey Street mural

A new artistic landmark has appeared on the streets of Cavan Town and with it, a call to inaction. Tóg go bog é declares the beautifully executed mural on Abbey Street.

“It means ‘Take it easy’ in Irish,” explains Vanessa Power, the highly respected street artist whose handiwork adorns the former McIntyre shop. She has helpfully painted the translation on the side of the wall facing Farnham Street.

“I’ve actually painted a few Irish pieces,” says Vanessa, brush in hand. Most notably she created a geometric tri-colour ‘Póg’ in Dublin last March to mark St Patrick’s Day in the capital. Another eye-catching commission was a recent front page for The Irish Times weekend supplement.

The driving force behind this mural project was Cavan Arts Festival committee, who hopes it goes some way to compensate for the pandemic scuppering this year’s live event.

“We still wanted to reach our audiences, both existing and new – we still wanted to employ artists and make commissions, and bring lovely art to town,” says Festival Director, Kim McCafferty. “Very quickly it became clear that a mural would be a really wonderful way to do that.”

Having looked “high up and low down” the festival committee settled on Vanessa, whose street artist moniker is ‘Signs of Power’, as their number one choice. Her brief was “light touch”, as Kim put it.

“We knew we wanted something colourful, bright and uplifting.”

The artist certainly delivered on that.

With the old abbey tower looming overhead, Vanessa, described the setting as “lovely”, adding: “There’s lots of cars going by wondering - what’s going on?”

At that stage, it was a fair question. Anyone who observed the art in progress may have been puzzled by the words blitzing the entire width of the wall. It looked like an enormous, bonkers word search, and there were plenty of words to find: ‘This is justice’, ‘Lock’, ‘Angelica’, ‘Joke’, ‘Cartography’.

“That’s actually a scribble grid,” Vanessa explained of the words now hidden beneath a layer of turquoise. “We threw loads of words and letters randomly on the wall and I used that as a reference to scale up the artwork.”

Vanessa elaborates: “I take a photo of the wall with all the scribbles on it. Then on Photoshop I overlay my design onto the scribbles and reduce the opacity so I can see where my artwork intersects with the scribbles, and I use that as my guide.”

The vacant building that provides Vanessa’s canvas has had many incarnations. Kim recalls it was used as a theatre during the Fleadh to stage the première of Philip Doherty’s The Devil’s Ceili. Long before that it had a bowling alley, and also a pool hall “for a few short years”, and of course a furniture store. Now it is owned by Cavan County Council, and it will ultimately come into play as part of the ambitious Abbeylands development, “much further down the line”, says Kim, acknowledging Tóg go bog é has a limited lifespan.

“We will have this for a long enough time to have made it very worth our while.”

Kim noted the difficulty in securing a wall for street art, but hopes this work will inspire more property owners to embrace murals.

“We hope this will show people how beautiful it is and what a marvellous asset to the town it is,” said Kim.

It’s not just property owners needed to make it a reality, Kim was eager to thank: “Creative Ireland, Cavan Co Co, Cavan Arts Office, This is Cavan, Arts Council of Ireland, Fleetwood Paints Virginia, Floods Taxis Cavan, Peggy Maguire Abbey Street and all the wonderful volunteers who came to paint the undercoat.”

Vanessa says street art has never been so popular.

“It’s so accessible and people love it, especially if it’s in a community, people take ownership, and feel proud: ‘That mural’s in my town’,” she says.

Vanessa is at ease with the knowledge her painting won’t last forever. When starting out, she was given good advice by a street art veteran:

“Once you get your photograph, let it go because the nature of street art: things are changing all the time and things get painted over or vandalised. You have to leave it up to the street and see what happens.”

Vanessa seems to have heeded her own advice.