Kaufman Loft Mural
Where Art Hits the Wall
Feature Article in The Kitchener Record Newspaper - January 12, 2008
COLIN HUNTER - RECORD STAFF - KITCHENER
Art usually hangs on the wall. Occasionally, art is the wall. Behold the peculiar wall that spans the entire foyer of Sandra Howard’s fifth-storey condo in Kitchener’s Kaufman Lofts building. It is a swirling, swooping, loop-de-looping feast for the eyes that spilled from Howard’s brain onto the wall in acrylic black paint during a weeklong creative frenzy that ended a few days ago. “It is (long, thoughtful pause) something,” says 23-year-old Howard, admiring her finished masterpiece, which also happens to separate her kitchen from her bedroom.
“It just sort of came to me.” Howard can be forgiven for not having a profound artist’s statement on the tip of her tongue about the underlying meaning of the abstract mural. She is not a professional artist. Nor does she aspire to be one. She is an account development representative, whatever that is, who spends her working hours penned-in by the unartistic faux-walls of her cubicle at a software firm. “I just wasn’t fulfilling any creative urge at work,” she says.The creative urge has been percolating inside Howard since childhood and flourished during her high school days in Burlington.
She was one of the top artists at her school but, like many university-bound teens, she opted for a somewhat more pragmatic course of study - media and communications at Laurier - to avoid the fate of starving artist. When she and longtime boyfriend Stephen Pell bought a loft in the Kaufman building last fall, though, her inner artist began to stir. The couple had previously lived in a drab basement apartment with head-high ceilings, so the new loft felt like a beautiful blank canvas. At first, she and Pell figured the monolithic off-white foyer wall could use some wallpaper to spruce it up, so they found a style they liked and got a price estimate. That estimate: 450 bucks. So they bought a tube of black paint instead. Total cost of materials for the mural: $2.99, plus tax.
