So, uh...
Last year I bought a 750 square foot painting.
10’ tall, 75’ long, on a lonnnng strip of curved concrete outside a busy downtown subway station.
Few months earlier I was walking on a freezing night with my friend Michael Bungay Stanier when we stumbled on a stunning spraypainted Hooded Merganser. I was shook!
I noticed a small word in the corner—Sweetman—and then googled “sweetman toronto” with the first link taking me to the Instagram page of Nick Sweetman who became my favorite graffiti artist.
For months, I kept wondering how I might work with Nick till one night I walked past a brutalist concrete wall behind Dupont Station.
The station is packed! Thousands of people pass that wall every day—students, office workers, Casa Loma tourists, subway trains rolling under, buses blaring past.
I learned the Toronto Transit Commission was paying to paint over tags on that wall 2-3x a week!
So I began organizing meetings with TTC folks and local associations to work through questions about paint, access, maintenance, and timelines.
Then I hired Nick for the the art!
I gave him my two-word vision—local birds!—and he did the rest.
There are 16 species on the wall and all have been seen within 333m of Dupont Station within the past 3.33 years according to data from eBird.
Nick truly made magic!
He started painting on September 17th (my bday!) and worked on it tirelessly—no stencils! no AI! no aids except a ladder!—until November.
From L to R, the 16 species of birds are:
Black-and-white Warbler, Blue Jay, White-breasted Nuthatch, Cedar Waxwing, Northern Flicker, Rose-breasted Grosbeak (my spark bird!), White-throated Sparrow, Scarlet Tanager, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, European Starling, Red-tailed Hawk, House Finch, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Turkey Vulture, Blackburnian Warbler, and Common Grackle.
Nick and I did a 3 Books podcast from the wall, made a little documentary, and his incredible art added some beauty to a slightly dreary corner.
Now we’re already talking about doing another one. (If you have a specific species of bird you'd like to see on the wall just let me know.)
Why did I do such a nutty project?
Well, honestly, the reason is pretty simple:
We all need little moments of happiness.
More beauty, more love, more energy, more awe.
More giant colorful things to walk by when you least expect them.
Research unsurprisingly shows interacting with art in city spaces helps make us happy.
From the study: “After interacting with the artistic intervention in an urban environment, the participants reported reduced feelings of anxiety, stress, and negative mood ....”
Anxiety?
Stress?
Negative mood?
We feel these things every day.
I do!
You do, too.
But let’s remember we have the power to add beauty to the world.
Shutting off the news.
Stepping outside to find green space.
Picking up a piece of trash we’re walking past.
Planting a couple flowers or a tree in our garden or backyard.
Adding a splash of paint to a forgotten wall or alley.
The bird wall was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever done and it brings me—and hopefully many others—joy every time I see it.
