Cam Scale: To The Unknown Mariner

Geelong has a new face on its waterfront. The Melbourne painter Cam Scale has finished a large mural on the old Port Authority building, a portrait of a weathered seaman looking out over Corio Bay, and he has called it To The Unknown Mariner. The whole job was photographed as it happened by the Instagram photographer p1xels, whose feed was featured in issue 32 of the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost, and Scale talked through the project once the scaffolding was down.

Geelong sits about 75 kilometres south-west of Melbourne, and its identity has been bound up with the port for as long as the city has existed. Wool and grain went out through it, and the town grew up facing the water. A mural on the Port Authority building, on Brougham Street, is about as direct a way into that history as a painter could ask for.

The face

Scale explained that the piece is dedicated to seafarers past and present, and that he wanted a model who looked as though he had spent his life around the ocean. He was put in touch with a local man named Bob, a former sailor who now works at a maritime museum. Bob agreed to let his likeness be used, and p1xels photographed him for the reference image.

Using a real person was a deliberate choice. A generic sailor painted from imagination tends towards cliché: the beard, the cap, the pipe. A real face brings the particular lines and marks that come from decades of weather, and it is those details, scaled up to the size of a building, that make a portrait like this hold attention from across the water. The title keeps the man anonymous, which lets him stand for everyone who went to sea from the port without being remembered by name.

The wall

The facts of the job, as Scale described them, give a good sense of what large-scale mural work involves:

The base coat alone says a lot. Raw brick soaks up paint, and Scale compared the wall to a sponge. Two days of work by two people went into sealing it before any of the image could start. Painting with brush and roller instead of spray is also a choice worth noting at this scale. It is slower, but it gives a denser, more even finish over a large surface and suits the soft, tonal modelling that a realistic portrait needs.

Why document it

Asked why the process mattered to him, Scale made a practical point. When he is concentrating on a wall he has no chance to step back and think about how he is working. Having every stage recorded by p1xels meant he could go back afterwards and see what had worked, where he had overworked an area, and which mistakes he could avoid next time. For a painter whose projects are getting bigger with each commission, a detailed record of one job is a useful tool for planning the next.

The photographs also give the mural a second life. Most people will never stand on the Geelong waterfront, but the sequence of images, from bare brick to finished face, lets them follow the whole thing. It is also a reminder of how much of a big wall is plain labour. A time-lapse or a finished photograph makes a portrait like this look as if it simply appeared. The record shows the days of base coat, the weather stoppages and the slow build-up of tone from the first blocking-in to the last highlights on the skin.

The partnership suits both sides. p1xels, whose Instagram work had already caught the attention of the street-art press, gets a subject that changes every day over nearly two weeks, with a single face emerging out of a blank wall. Scale gets a working archive of his own process that he could never have made himself while standing on a lift with a roller in his hand.

2016

Looking ahead, Scale said he had never painted outside Australia and would like to take on large walls in other countries. He also planned to go back to canvas, working towards a show later in 2016 at Juddy Roller, the Melbourne gallery.