A Regina artist is putting the finishing touches on the largest mural in Saskatoon.
The mural is painted on the side of the First Nations Bank on Fourth Avenue. Artist Emmanuel Jarus arrived in Saskatoon on Wednesday and has been working on the mural ever since.
The City of Saskatoon worked with Yellow Quill First Nation and the Downtown Improvement District to bring the nine-storey façade to life.
The painting is based off a photo shoot with Yellow Quill models and depicts a mother and father holding their child. A red ribbon in the painting commemorates missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the blue paint along the bottom also has some special meaning.
“Just the struggle that the Yellow Quill had with their own water reserves, and how British settlement decided to place dams and ruin the existing ecosystem,” Jarus explained. “For them, they really wanted to symbolize rising out of water and not letting the water bog them down, so that’s one of the main symbols.”
Jarus expects he’ll use more than 50 gallons of paint to complete the mural sometime in the next week.
The cost of the mural is $15,000 which is funded by the City of Saskatoon’s Placemaker program for public art.
