The Bray Mural/Background and History

                                    A section of the Panels at Bray Dart Station

The following is a brief description of how the Mural in Bray Dart Station in County Wicklow came to be designed and painted by the artists John Carter and Jay Roche  - 

Back in 1987, in the midst of economic gloom and high unemployment in Ireland there were few opportunities for artists to make money. When a competition, set up by community Arts organiser Anne Hennesy, was advertised to design a mural in Bray Dart station, county Wicklow it seemed like the best chance of getting a job for the summer in between our first and second year in Art college.

                                     The Artists Jay Roche and John Carter in 1987

We based our proposal on the fact that passengers are central to a train station and that we would make the people of Bray the subject of our design. The platform wall already had a series of 19 framed tableau which had originally been used for advertising, so we decided to create a chronological history of the people of Bray as seen passing through its train station. We submitted a full design of each panel representing each decade between the opening of the station in 1852 up to the 1980's. The designs were displayed for a couple of weeks and the winner was decided by the people of Bray who voted our design as the one to adorn the wall of platform 2.

We began by converting our designs into scaled line drawings and transferring them into each panel - it was a fairly straight forward process but we had been careful to create a style that suited the project. Figuration had made something of a return to contemporary art in the 1980's and as young students we had been looking at artists whose work there was a revival of interest in. Chief among these were painters like Stanley Spencer and Diego Rivera whose styles had developed out of a desire to create a more 'public' art and particularly in the case of Rivera, one with a social conscience.

                                                                      Stanley Spencer                                                                      Diego Rivera

Coupled with this was an interest in the socialist realism of the Soviet Union. Our appreciation in this case was far more to do with the bold shapes and plasticism of the style and less with the ideological propaganda. 

Also important were the great American muralists of the 1930's such as Thomas Hart Benton who were funded during the US depression to decorate the walls of many public buildings and in some cases, train stations.

                       Thomas Hart Benton                                                               Thomas Hart Benton

Common to all of these artists was an interest in storytelling and a desire to represent people as part of an historical narrative. This idea became central to our murals and each panel has references to both the small and greater aspects of life at the times depicted.

For example in the panel above we see a reference in the figure on the left to the 'Black and Tans', a paramilitary group that was set up by the British to act as support for the Irish Constabulary against revolutionaries. We wanted to find a way off showing how after a difficult and eventful decade, Ireland was shaking off it's colonial past and opening up a new era. The panels shows how even though dramatic events were unfolding, life went on as workers arranged to hang a new sign in the station.

The Panels were finally completed towards the end of July 1987 and the mural was officially opened by the inimitable Micheal D. Higgins T.D. In his speech he referenced the importance of having an appreciation of both national and local history and that we should not be afraid to represent events that were part of our heritage. His words made reference to an event that occured during our work on the mural which I will detail in the next post...