What is it with painted buildings in Wellington? Whatever it is, there's a lot of it going on. Our very own ‘art’ hotel has a never-to-be-forgotten (see True Lies post) painting by French artist and Berlin Wall painter Gabriel Heimler and now across town the Tattoo Apartments on Abel Smith Street are getting in on the act.
They are in the final throws of getting a paint job with a mural that looks like a couple of guys doing their own Le Pétomane performance. But hang on a minute, the drawings for this block that were displayed on its surrounding fence while it was being built featured a bird painting by Australian Geoff Dixon.
Agent: “Yeah, I know you were expecting a native bird mural but we thought, what the hell, it’s a university town, let’s go for it.”
Given that the apartment building is called Tattoo (it’s on the old site of the Wellington Tattoo Museum), they might have gone even further with something like, say, a dragon. That’s what the Tattoo Museum itself has done after moving in a couple of doors down from us. At least you know where you are with dragons: they breathe their fire from the right end.
Images: Top left the Museum Hotel, right the original paint concept for the Tattoo apartments. Bottom left the final painting of the Tattoo apartments and right the new Tattoo Museum on the corner of Vivian and Victoria Streets.
