Urban street art on Vaughan bridge turning heads

‘I want my art to be shown to people on a hike, people driving by.’

Yorkregion.com
Aug. 6, 2015
By Adam Martin-Robbins

A local artist is adding a big splash of colour to a dull, grey corner of Vaughan.

And he’s hoping it will inspire others to do the same.

Stefano Bove, an abstract painter, is creating two massive murals - one of a moonrise and one of a sunset - on the abutments under the Rutherford Road bridge that spans the East Humber River, between Islington Avenue and Pine Valley Drive.

It’s a popular spot for hikers and cyclists who regularly traverse the William Granger Greenway, a wide crushed-gravel trail that passes under the bridge along the east side of the river.

“What drove me to doing work like this is the fact that the people I want to attract, the people I want to see my work, are the people in the general public,” said Bove, a recent graduate of the bachelor of fine arts program at York University.

“When I go to an art gallery opening, it’s always the same people. It’s the art community and I don’t want the art community ... I want my art to be shown to people on a hike, people who are driving by.

“If someone walks by here, stops and says ‘Wow that looks nice, that looks really cool.’ and asks me questions, my job is done. My job as an artist is to show that to people.”

Bove lives in the area and spends a lot of time on the trail.

He noticed a lot of graffiti under the bridge and was inspired to create a piece of fine art that a wider audience would be able to appreciate.

“When I look at a spot that I want to paint, I just think about what could I do here?” the 26-year-old lifelong Vaughan resident said.

“So what came to mind here, because the river runs north and south, I thought about the correlation between the moon rising and the sun setting. The sun sets in the west and the moon rises in the east, so that’s where I came up with the design.”

Not knowing whom to contact to get permission to create the murals, Bove said he fired off an email to his local Vaughan city councillor, who then connected him with the appropriate staff people at the Region of York, which has jurisdiction over Rutherford Road.

When he pitched the idea to regional staffers, Bove said they were “really enthusiastic.”

They offered to clean up the graffiti, prime both abutments and seal the paintings once they are completed to protect them from the elements.

Bove started working on the murals, each of which is roughly 55 feet wide by 10 feet high, on Sunday, July 23.

He hoped to have them completed by the end of the Civic holiday, working on his days off from his job as a store manager at Toys ‘R’ Us.

Given the size of the paintings, Bove enlisted the help of his girlfriend Diana Carrano and nine other friends.

They started with the moonrise mural, which depicts beams of light, divided into different coloured rectangles, streaming through clouds from the top of the abutment.

The other mural will be similar, but flipped so that the beams of sunlight burst up from bottom, he explained at the site last Friday morning.

“This design that I came up with, the abstracted forms, it comes from cathedral windows - stained glass windows,” he said.

Even before it was finished, the mural was turning heads.

A woman walking under the bridge on Friday, as the crew worked away with their brushes, uttered: “It’s beautiful.”

Bove said people have been reacting that way right from the get-go.

“I actually had a lady walk by on Sunday, she was with her family, stopped and said hi and took some pictures with us,” he recalled.

“When she was leaving, what she said to us just made everything worth it. She said: ‘Thank you for making our city beautiful.’ It just gave everyone goosebumps.”

Bove has been painting since his days at Father Bressani Catholic High School.

After graduating and deciding that’s what we wanted to do, he pursued formal training at Sheridan College and York University.

Bove started out creating pieces on more traditional canvases and has had a few gallery showings, but shifted his focus to street art, or urban art, a couple of years ago.

The most challenging part of his latest project, Bove said, was working through liability issues and getting permission from the local conservation authority.

But that was to be expected, he said noting that unlike Toronto, where there’s an established urban art scene, this is fairly new to Vaughan.

He’s hoping that his murals will spark others to transform pieces of public infrastructure into works of art.

“I know many artists from Woodbridge, but there’s no art scene here, everyone goes downtown,” he said. “Hopefully this shows that there can potentially be an art scene here and bring art to Vaughan.”