Nearly twenty years ago, local artist Beverley Smith was wrestling with a 16-foot ladder on Ste. Marie Street trying to prop it up against the yellow brick wall of what is now the Shipyards Medical building.
She climbed the ladder with her paints and a cup of water determined to make some touch-ups to the joints in the panels that displayed her painting of shipyard workers riding their bicycles to work. Smith is the artist who created Heading Dockside, a mural still adorning the side of the yellow-brick building.
Smith was commissioned in 2000 by the Town of Collingwood to create a mural paying tribute to Collingwood’s Shipyard industry. The town received funding for a millennium project and commissioned both her mural and the one depicting a side launch that now adorns the Loblaw building on Hurontario and First Street.
“If you’re going to put up a mural, there has to be a reason for it,” said Smith. “I think it’s nice to have a reminder for the town of the Shipyards.”
Smith’s mural is slated for removal soon. The mural was painted on wood panels and the paint is flaking off where the wood has swelled from water saturation. Council will be voting on Monday to approve removing and replacing the mural.
Heading Dockside is an original drawing created by Smith. She took some inspiration from a book of black-and-white photographs of the Shipyards taken by Ursula Heller. She has also been a local resident since 1980 and was at the Shipyard for the final side launch, so she recalls some of the scenes from memory.
“The fact that they rode their bicycles to work was fun,” said Smith. The bicycles feature prominently in the mural as workers ride toward a water tower, shipyards building and whistle blowing steam across the wall.
She worked to create a piece that would fit in with the yellow brick wall it was to be installed on. She chose a subtle colour palette to blend in, and mimicked the yellow bricks in the background of some of the panels. She depicts a woman leaning out from a window to hand a lunchbox to a worker, and that part of the painting incorporates a physical window in the wall.
“I really wanted to incorporate the window and the door into the mural,” said Smith.
She painted a nurse into the bicycle-riding crowd to represent the Shipyards staff nurse who worked to take care of the crews each shift.
Smith painted the mural a few panels at a time in her neighbour’s barn, where she and her husband had to fend off porcupines threatening to chew the wood panels that served as her canvas.
Her favourite element in the design is a saxophone player in the bottom right corner. Her shipyard musician was inspired by the story of Gordon “Steamer” Clark, a shipyards worker known for playing his saxophone. He died in 1999, just a year before the mural was painted, but while Smith was touching up the installation, two women stopped to say they were his daughter and widow, and were pleased to see him represented.
“People might look at that and think ‘why is there a saxophone player?’” said Smith. “But it wasn’t something I made up. True locals would get that.”
Smith had painted a mural on the Ravenna General Store before painting her Heading Dockside mural, but she said the Collingwood piece made her nervous.
She figured there would be a lot of attention, but her installation went up with relatively little fanfare until a small ribbon cutting ceremony in the cold drew a crowd of about six, she recalled with a laugh. In fact, she didn’t make the official newspaper photograph of the murals.
She is glad it lasted 19 years, and said she’s sad to see it go. Smith creates mostly beadwork now, and those projects are relatively small. She owned and operated Holy Crow Beads in the Blue Mountains, but has since closed the store and is operating a studio with regular sales throughout the year. She was glad to be able to work on something as large scale as a mural, and on a medium she loves.
In her travels (she’s visited 35 countries) she often stops to admire murals and graffiti. She’s looking forward to seeing what will go up next, and has been asked to join the ad-hoc committee in charge of selecting the next work.
“In that spot, you have to consider where it is, and it has to work on the wall,” she said. “A lot of murals are done on a blank wall. This wall has windows and doors. I think murals don’t always have to be a rectangular painting on a wall.”
Smith said she’s had her turn painting a mural in that spot and looks forward to someone else getting a turn.
Currently, she’s working on a beadwork project creating a beaded piece to represent each of the 35 countries she visited in her lifetime. The works will be on display at the L.E. Shore Memorial Library in Thornbury beginning May 4.
