Mural Film | Sydney G James for Fellowship.art
A mural happens slowly and then it's done
Mural work is a filmmaking gift and a scheduling nightmare. The gift is that the subject visibly changes over days, so there's built-in progression. The nightmare is that it happens on a wall, outdoors, at the mercy of weather and light, over a stretch of time you don't control. Sydney G James was painting a large-scale piece on a historic building in the Milwaukee area, and the scale is the thing that's hard to convey. Standing next to a mural, you can't see the mural. Aerial cinematography solves that instantly, giving you the whole work and the building it lives on in one frame. Then it's about staying out of the way. An artist working is not a performance, and the temptation to direct a subject who is already doing something interesting is the thing to resist.
Who is
Fellowship.art
Fellowship.art is a 12-week accelerator for visual artists, giving them the mentorship and support to build sustainable practices and navigate the industry. Sydney G James is an artist known for large-scale figurative murals.
Scale, finally visible
Fellowship.art got a film that shows both the artist working and the finished mural at full scale, which a viewer standing on the sidewalk can never actually take in at once. It gives the program a concrete piece of evidence for what supporting an artist produces.
