Newcastle artist Trevor Dickinson has once again branded the city that is the subject of his work.
Today he showed off his latest work, an interactive mural at the Newcastle Museum.
[nggallery id=1]It’s the third mural painted by Dickinson and he says the idea to create an interactive ‘photowall’ developed when he realised people were posing in front of the images on the Newcastle Tunnel mural – his first addition to the city’s landscape.
And today not even the Lord Mayor could resist an opportunity to be photographed in the seat designed for him but now open to anyone who wants to be photographed in front of it.
“It’s not just for looking at, it’s for standing in front of and being photographed in front of, so its almost like you are standing in a cartoon.”
The artist has called Newcastle home since 2009 and the city is both his canvas and his inspiration.
But the subjects for his work may not be what you would traditionally expect an artist to use to showcase Newcastle.
“There is a lot of different things…because you have the whole beach culture, plus it is an urban city and I think people respond to the work a bit because usually the beach culture is what’s depicted mostly, but I kind of tend to do the more real side of the city a bit more as well that people tend to recognise, and understand if you live there.”
“I’m from England and so initially I was looking at Newcastle like I was a foreigner…I’m just picking up on slight differences and they tend to be things that people just take for granted, and it’s what they just grow up with…so they don’t notice, so coming in as a foreigner you pick up on odd things like the telegraph poles, storm drains, the post boxes, the palm trees, just all the things I didn’t have in my background.”
A dinosaur, the Newcastle hollywood sign on Nobby’s Beach and the Lord Mayors chair are just a few of the elements Dickinson used in his latest project to both showcase the city and allow the audience to take an active role.
And he says it’s this interactive element that draws him to create pieces on such a large scale.
“It’s fantastic…I just had an idea for doing a photowall and being given two such brilliant walls to do it on is just a dream so now I can see you have an idea and you can do it and see if it works, and it does work quite well, people come along and pose with it and they look great in photographs as well, which is the whole point. ”
