How Far Will Your Ticket Take You?

Celebrating, and recovering from, my first large-scale painting project with the Lewisham School of Muralism at Euston Station.

The Euston Station project came as a bit of a surprise and in no small part due to the publicity around two major murals in Lewisham completed by the first cohort. So, with a little rejigging, our tutor Patricio Forrester accelerated the copyleft/concept development portion of the course so we could deliver our first collaborative project before the mid-term.

Alongside some *pretty intense* drawing classes on Saturday’s we spent Wednesday evenings workshopping and refining ideas, balancing narratives around trains, travel and timing alongside a need to elevate the messaging beyond a straight marketing visual.

We settled on the idea of a collection of folded, imagined tickets, exposing a stylized version of the familiar Network Rail graphic intertwined or layered upon drawn reactions to recurring themes - altered realities, solidarities and corporeality.

Then arrived a curveball, we had to paint at night! The 100K people that pass through Euston a day is obviously a huge selling point, but now we had to make sure not to get in their way! But I guess that’s all part of the lifestyle … so painted at night, 9pm - 5am, for 8 nights in a row. Though to be fair I did two short shifts - can’t skip the day job yet.

Working museum events, I’m used to seeing typically busy places eerily empty, but Euston revealed her own set of secrets. The best of which is that the station isn’t ever that quiet! With Euro 2020 fans streaming through alongside the commuter crowd it quickly became apparent why we were painting in the dark. But even when the shutters come down there’s a host of local characters, contractors and station staff that meant we still had to negotiate for space at 2am.

As the weariness kicked in and the nights wore on, we kept spirits up watching the mural emerge in an almost perfect counter-scale to the marching tiredness. Plus we got some special guest appearances from Joe, Amy, Al and Liz for LSoM V1.

It’s a long time since I’ve been up nights bartending and admittedly some days were pretty tough, but if you’re going to lose sleep can you think of any better reason than painting?

A few highlights

• Bumping into my second cousin Joe (who I don’t think I’ve ever actually met before) off the back of some Irish I’d written on the wall - confirming at least one stereotype about our lot all knowing each other.

• M&S Millionaire mini-bites, every night for eight nights

• Some banging 2am tunes, painting under the floodlights

• (NOT VARNISHING - Ouch)

• Seeing the finished painting at sunrise and knowing I had three days of solid sleep to catch up on

A huge thank you to Patricio Forrester of Artmongers, and Lewisham School of Muralism tutor, for guiding us through this process … and of course teaching me how to paint. And a lot of love to the LSoM II painting crew.

Photo credits to the whole school! No one knows who took the photos anymore