The Merry Mermaids, a Painted Mural in Cornwall
A Spontaneous Visit
At the start of the new year, I made a rush decision to pack my bags and go to the UK. Although not the most sought after destination for a winter escapade, I had some good reasons to go to Cornwall. Friendship, first of all, and the possibility of a crisp empty wall to paint.
The location was the Cornish Bank, a non-profit music and arts venue in Falmouth. I didn’t know anything about the city, the area, or the venue, but decided to immerse myself as much as I could in the short span of time I had there.
Cornwall seems to live outside the rest of the island.
Life moves a bit slower there, connection to the mainland is difficult as there is no highway, giving a feeling that you are isolated from busy city life, and almost protected and surrounded by bucolic landscapes. The Cornish have their own language, customs, and folklore. There is an indelible mystic to the air, many creatures and magic live among the untamed rugged coastline.
This was where I drank from to inspire my design for the mural I was about to make.
Over the course of the next week I spent about 50 hours planning, researching, designing, sketching and painting the downstairs wall of the Cornish Bank. Throughout the process I received a helping hand from old and new friends, missed a flight, learned Cornish tradicional dancing, had a music jam in the downstairs vault, and survived on Cornish pasties.
The Setting
The connection to the Cornish Bank came via my friend Jake, a friend from my time Bristol whom I have shared a house and many laughs and adventures with. He moved to Falmouth in the summer and started working at this music venue and had many tales to share about his new life. I decided to come see it for myself, and bought a spur-of-the-moment flight to go see him two weeks later, after a nostalgic memory sparked by a car drive in the rain.
I realised he was going to be working at the time of my visit so I decided I should do the same. I got the approval from the Bank to choose a wall and paint it at my heart’s desire (pretty much heaven to an artist).
The Cornish Bank is a large venue that has had many lives, it used to be a bank (as the name indicates), but also a council one-stop shop, among others. After the pandemic, Will Greenham and Rufus Maurice decided to turn it into the arts and music venue that they wished Cornwall had. The space itself is beautiful, with colourful walls, little unexpected nooks and crannies, and large windows with a view to the river Fal and the port. But most importantly, the people there seem to think that the Cornish Bank is the venue that the city and the overall area was needing. Since it’s opening two years ago, it’s been an epicentre for culture and music, bringing bands and musicians to an area that wasn’t part of the tour trail until now.
The more I experienced this space and learned about it, the more grateful I felt to be a part of it. I chose a wall in the downstairs area, visible as soon as you arrive at the venue from the garden. It was an unloved passage area, and I wanted to make it special.
Cornish Folklore
Settling to work at a table facing the river and in between many cups of tea, I worked on the theme and design for the wall I chose. I delved deep into the wikipedia wormhole, reading about the different traditions and folktales of the area. Popping out for a stroll around the town, I stopped in a couple of bookshops looking for books on Cornish mythology. I got back with a little collection about stone circles, herbal medicines and mythological creatures.
The legends and the cast of characters they involve are plentiful. Knockers, buccas, piskies, giants and mermaids paint the stories of this area, to name a few. As Cornwall has a centuries old tradition of tin mining, a lot of these creatures originated “as a supernatural explanation of the frequent accidents and cave-ins that killed and injured many miners. It may be that the oxygen starved minds of the miners gave rise to such creatures as they struggled to the surface.”
The story of a local stone circle caught my attention. The Merry Mermaids are a circle of nineteen stones in St.Buryan. The legend goes that nineteen maidens were dancing to the music of two pipers one fateful Saturday evening. In between pantagruelian celebrations they didn’t realise the night turning to morning. Hearing the church clock strike midnight, both pipers tried to run away, but in their escape got turned into two megaliths a little way from the stone circle. In their trance and unaware of their predicament, the nineteen maidens got caught on the Sunday and turned to stone.
You can still visit the standing stones in Cornwall. I decided to adapt this story into an illustration. The pipers materialised as two mermaids, common creatures in local mythology as Cornwall is surrounded by coast. I adorned their hair with the night sky, turned their pipes into shells and placed a little Obi Oss hiding in the corner - a Cornish May Day celebration in Padstow, where men wear a hobby horse, causing fuss around town and attempt to catch women within their cape.
I named it “The Merry Mermaids”.
The Process
Painting in large scale is always a different challenge. Every surface is different, the setting, the height, and the materials at hand vary. This time I was painting in a hallway where people were regularly going through. After painting a base colour of blue, we managed to set up a projector to project the design onto half of the wall, which I traced using chalk and avoiding my own shadow. Due to the shape of the corridor, the projector couldn’t reach the rest of the wall, so I simply sketched the drawing with chalk. Chalk is a good material for this as it is easy to clean up and it allows to quickly correct mistakes.
Now came the long part: painting. I’m still learning how long this process takes and, this is very dependent on the type of wall and paint you have, and how well they interact. Once again I underestimated how long this would take. The most painstaking part is going over the same colours in order for them to pop as much as I wanted them too. Those god forsaken yellow stars needed to be coated four times. Thankfully a few friends I made along the way were happy to help speed up this process.
The colours I chose were also an unexpected part of the process. We dug deep inside the Bank’s storage and found a series of cans of paint, of all sorts of colours and sizes. It made sense to use these instead of buying more material: once I colour coded everything I organised my colour scheme. Creation flourishes through limitations, and having a palette that I didn’t choose made me use colours that I usually wouldn’t, turning this piece into an unexpected painting. I was very pleasantly surprised by the results and I might have accidentally stumbled upon a new set of colours to use in my work.
About a week in, and after staying up until unreasonably late singing karaoke and having a jam in The Vault studio downstairs after a Cornish Bank staff party, me and Jake spent the entire day painting. It was my last day in Falmouth and at 6am the next day I had to be in Bristol to catch my flight back home. We spent 13h painting, listening to music, chatting and laughing. It was demanding but a good way to spend the last day with my friend. However, as the hours passed and the time to leave approached, I started to realise that this work would not be finished on time. I thought about ways to delegate the last parts and organize everything so that someone could pick up the last bits and finish painting, but my heart was aching with the thought of leaving something I had spent so many hours making, only 90% completed. And we all know that the last 10% is the most important, detailed work. After a long monologue inside my head and 5 minutes before the time we had set to leave (we still had a 3h drive to Bristol, then I had a flight to Faro followed by a bus to Lisbon - a total of 16h of travel ahead of me with no sleep and a hangover), I decided to buy another flight back. It was a rushed decision, but on par with the rest of the trip. Having just gained three more days to work on the mural and not having to leave unrested in a rush, we went home delighted at about 4am to get some sleep, before doing the same thing all over again the next day.
And thus the mural was finished. I spent the following days pretty much just painting and painting, and still managed to stay until the very last minute finishing up the details before doing the long travel back. But this time we finished at 1am with no hangover, and I got back feeling incredibly inspired and empowered.
My time in Falmouth was short but important. I made work that I loved and I met some lovely people along the way who made me feel right at home. I know I’ll be coming back soon, but for now you can go see a part of my soul, sweat and tears in the downstairs area of the Cornish Bank.
(BIG FAT THANK YOU to Jake for being a best friend and constant companion in all types of miscellaneous mischief, to Will and Rufus for creating such a beautiful space and letting me splatter paint over some of it, to all the friends who made me dinner and shared pints, and especially those who helped me paint The Merry Mermaids: Bex, Dan and Jacob - you live in my heart forever and in the walls of the Bank for a while.)