December 4, 2024

realpaperworks

A nice shiny new Art

Summer of colour: Calgary native Michelle Hoogveld’s murals get global traction

Article content

For a solid week near the end of June, artist Michelle Hoogveld fielded questions on the street from curious passersby as she worked on a massive street mural at Deerfoot City in Calgary’s northeast.

Advertisement

Article content

Some of the questions were fairly typical: How many gallons of paint will you use? How many colours are involved? How did you choose the colours? How long will it take to finish?

Others were a little less obvious.

“Did I buy my pants (like this) or did this just naturally happen to my pants?” says Hoogveld with a laugh, talking to Postmedia on a break from a new project in Worcester, Mass. “Just because they are covered in paint, often people think it’s a fashion statement. I just say: ‘They change every day!’”

An aerial view of Heat Waves at Deerfoot City by Calgary artist Michelle Hoogveld. Photo by Arden Shibley.
An aerial view of Heat Waves at Deerfoot City by Calgary artist Michelle Hoogveld. Photo by Arden Shibley. jpg

Interacting with the public was one of the perks as the increasingly in-demand muralist worked on Heat Waves, a vibrant, 50-colour, hand-painted street mural of interlocking geometric shapes that stretches 65 metres over a new outdoor art, play-and-patio space dubbed #YYCBlockParty.

Advertisement

Article content

“With Heat Waves, it was really nice because I was on the ground level,” Hoogveld says. “You can chat with people and hear their input and how they respond to the work.”

This isn’t always the case with her projects. By the time #YYCBlockParty officially opened on July 2, Hoogveld was already working on another mural on the other side of the country. In Montreal, where she now lives, she and two assistants spent most of July painting a mural that covers the front facade of Hotel Le Germain as part of the city’s MURAL Fest. The piece required the three to work well above street level on a swing stage.

“You’re very isolated up in the air,” Hoogveld says. “So me and my two assistants were joking and having little dance parties all day long while painting.”

Advertisement

Article content

While Hoogveld’s murals can be seen throughout Calgary — including the 290-metre Corridor of Connection on both sides of the 4th Street S.E. underpass — her reputation and work have gone global. She has painted murals in Peru, Beverly Hills, England, Hawaii and Portugal and counts Lululemon, Barry’s Bootcamp and Holt Renfrew among her clients.

But this summer she seems especially busy. In just over a month, she has gone from an outdoor shopping centre in northeast Calgary, to hovering 52 metres above the streets of Montreal, to painting on the side of a school in Massachusetts as part of the fifth-year anniversary of the renowned POW! WOW! festival. After that, she is back in Beverly Hills to paint a mural on a private basketball court across from the Beverly Hills Hotel. Then she is off to Missoula, Mont., to paint a mural as part of Allez!, a revolving outdoor urban art gallery. By the fall, she will be in Italy assisting her friend and fellow muralist Ola Volo, who will be painting a mural on the side of a cruise ship.

Advertisement

Article content

It all sounds very exotic. And it is. But the projects are also a lot of work that requires not only imagination and creativity but an ability to figure out the small mathematical details that make up the bigger picture. Heat Waves, which Hoogveld did in partnership with Calgary’s PARK (Promoting Artists/Redefining Kulture) and Destination Deerfoot City, is a street mural that covers a hopscotch area, a basketball court, ping pong tables, tetherball and a running track. It is also the largest street mural in the city’s history.

“I love to see the space first and get an idea of the canvas I’m working on,” Hoogveld says. “From there, using my style to bring in geometric shapes and the gradients of colour, it’s about the connection of all those pieces. In this one in particular, and in many of my pieces, there’s the formation of a geometric heart. At the centre of Heat Waves, it was the idea of love and this idea that we come together in beautiful bright colours just to bring an emotional feeling of happiness and joy and bright energy to the city.”

Advertisement

Article content

The interactive aspects of the mural — participants can “jump onto big triangles of colour and have some fun while they were interacting with the art” — were a particular challenge.

It’s about finding a balance where each element can “live and breathe in their own little space but still come together in united and harmonious form,” she says.

“For me, it comes down to the calculations of my shapes,” Hoogveld says. “Funny enough, I never really was a great math student and now I find myself using it constantly; figuring out the angles of triangles and all those things.”

Born and raised in Calgary, Hoogveld was always interested in art. But she actually attended Lynn University in Florida on a sports scholarship after becoming a soccer star playing for the school formerly known as Bishop Grandin. She ended up going to teachers college in Vancouver and taught high-school art for a few years before deciding she wanted to dedicate herself to her own artistic pursuits.

Advertisement

Article content

While she was still teaching, she became inspired by both local artists creating murals in town and the work she had seen during her travels around the world. In 2015, she was accepted into the Utility Box Public Art program in Calgary. It kick-started her career as a muralist and in public art, albeit on a much smaller scale than what was to come.

A month after she decided to leave teaching, she was contacted by the Calgary Municipal Land Corp. and informed she had been selected to create a mural for the 4th Street underpass. It was completed in 2018.

“That was a sign,” she says. “That’s when I knew intuitively that I had made the right decision. That piece was about (290 metres long) and it was the biggest mural I had done to date. It was such a great opportunity when I was just starting out in the public art field.”

Advertisement

Article content

Roughly a year ago during the early days of the pandemic, Hoogveld had begun thinking about her future and where she wanted to go artistically.

“I said to myself, ‘I really want to scale up and do some big pieces in the next few years,’” she says. “It’s interesting, sometimes you put something out there and it comes back. It seems like this summer is filled with these really big pieces.”

While she currently lives in Montreal and travels the world, she says it was Calgary that gave her a healthy, auspicious start in the business.

“Now that I’m going to all these new places and travelling with my artwork, I feel that Calgary was such a great city to support myself as an emerging artist,” she says. “I had incredible opportunities to develop my portfolio and go to places around the world. For me, Calgary has been special.”

Advertisement

Comments

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notifications—you will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.