2 years after being found in the snow, Sheila's Brush mural has a new home in St. John's
CBC
Two years after an iconic St. John's mural was found on the ground in a pile of snow-covered garbage, a group of volunteers has restored the painting and given it a new home.
Sheila's Brush, a mural painted by Helen Gregory that had been hanging in downtown St. John's since 1992, had faced much of the weather and winds the painting depicts over the years. It had been ripped off its original hanging place on Harbour Drive, and was found in a snowbank by Diana Daly.
Daly told CBC News this week she had a "visceral reaction" to seeing it discarded.
"This piece, for me as someone who grew up in St. John's, was always a really important piece because it was about us. It felt very much, like, what it means to live here and to live here year round."
Efforts to return the mural to its original glory began shortly after it was found.
Now the completed work hangs on the Benevolent Irish Society building in downtown St. John's.
Gregory, who got to see it in person for the first time over the weekend, said it was amazing to see it restored.
"It's so exciting to see it sort of brought back to, you know, so close to its original," she said.
"It was very clear that the mural was about a lot more than me. It wasn't just, like, the result of a summer job that I had, you know, 30 years ago. You know, it was something that was really meaningful to a lot of people."
Mural artist Gary Taylor helped to restore the painting. He and a team of others worked from reference photography, but it was a challenge because most of the photography showed the wear and tear over the years.
That was until Gregory, who now lives outside the province, found photos of the mural from when it was unveiled in her basement.
"My God, some of them were Polaroids. They were not great photos, but what you could see was like the colour. The palette was so different, and the detail," she said.
"When she found these, it was like this, you know, whole world opened," Taylor added.
"It was like some kind of, you know, forensic artistic cold case where we put it back together."
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