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Tottenham band shell comes alive visually with new mural 

October 13, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

The band shell at Keogh Park in Tottenham has a new look thanks to a group of volunteers who turned the interior walls of the stage into a work of art.

Previous artwork had started to age and was eventually painted over. It was decided a new mural on the walls would add some flair to the stage area.

Russell Kelly, one of the founding members of the Sunday Music in the Park concerts series, and a sign painter by trade led the project, recruiting some local students to help get the job done.

“We went to the school and got some students the first time we did it,” he explained. “We had ten or 12 kids and painted the last one, and put all their names on the wall and it stayed for eight or nine years. Just before COVID, Rick Milne [mayor] and Alan Lacey [local councillor] were at Music in the Park and I suggested it’s time we re-do it, they agreed, but then COVID hit.”

He approached Brittany Ziegler, an art teacher at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Secondary School in Tottenham and asked if she could find a student to design a new mural.

“Last year I had a group of 12 kids who wanted to do this,” Ms. Ziegler said. “I asked Charlotte if she wanted to submit a design. Since she has now graduated, I sent a message to her and asked if she would like to design something. Some of these kids are from my art club at school and some are from my art class.”

Once the design was created, it was projected on the band shell walls and felt markers were used to trace the outline. The students got to work on Saturday, Oct. 1, painting the background and working on some of the coloured areas. They finished up the following day, filling in the colour portions portraying musicians and performers from various music genres.

Charlotte Brooks is no longer a student at St. Thomas, but started designing the project while she was still at the school. She is planning a career path in art and this project will certainly go well on her resumé.

“The main thing I was told [is] that it should be something almost like ‘paint by numbers,” Charlotte explained, since none of the students had experience working on a mural. “They wanted some ‘pop art’ style, so I really focused on colour. I wanted to overlap the figures because quite often in pop art you have colours that overlap each other. I really focused on doing something music-based because it’s going in a bandstand – the stage is mostly for bands. I did a lot of research on music genres, and did country, jazz, rock, and regular pop as well.”

Charlotte chose the outline of a female figure to go in the middle on the back wall as the feminine contours would flow nicely with the tall wall and opposed the wider features of a piano and drum kit on the side walls.

The result is a splashy and colourful music-themed background that will make a great addition to the local music scene once the Concerts in the Park series gets underway next summer.

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