He’s just returned to Perth after painting a mural in Florence, yet international artist Stormie Mills is already on to his next challenge and creating murals for a new residential building in Como.
Mills has been approached by developer Fini Developments to create two murals at a new five-storey residential building at 21 Henley Street.
He started painting on Tuesday and the murals are estimated to take a month to create.
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READ NOWThe two murals will be on the building’s exterior east and west walls and will depict the surrounding landscape.
“It was really exciting that as developers they were open to exploring something more abstract on the building,” Mills said.
“The work is experimental in execution but I’m aiming for what I call a reflective landscape.
“What you see looking at the building will be an artistic version of what someone in the building sees looking out.”
The new building with 19 apartments is six to eight weeks away from completion.
The project begins just as another ends for Mills, who has returned from Florence after repainting a mural he had created on the wall of the oldest rowing club in the Italian city in 2018.
He was invited back by the organisers of the Florence Biennale art exhibition in Tuscany’s capital to repaint the mural after it was damaged by unknown means earlier this year.
“This was a really great opportunity as it gave me a chance to rethink the work,” he said.
The mural is now about 3m high and about 25m wide and was repainted over four days.
The mural Mills created in 2018 pictured a single rower and only took up part of the wall.
But soon after arriving in Florence to repaint the mural, he was told an orchestra also rehearsed in the same space so he decided to create a completely different mural.
“The idea was to integrate the community that existed in that space, so I told the story of the rowers and the orchestra,” he said.
“The finished work is called The Difference Between Coincidence and Synchronicity, which is about that idea when someone does something bad, do something good to help change your perspective on it.
“It reflected the rhythm of the rowers and the orchestra, working in synchronicity — I could see the parallels, which was part of my story.”