Relying on my best friend, Google, I tracked down a company here in Melbourne and commissioned the amazing Awes, who collaborated with his mate Mayonnaize to produce the art below.
(It's not actually curved - I nicked this pic off Mayonnaize's Instagram and not sure how he took it, but it does manage to get the whole wall in. It also wraps around the left-hand side to cover the wall facing that laneway as well. It's hard to get a shot, as it's big and in a confined space - I think this is from our neighbour's garage roof!)
The process was a bit of a leap of faith, as there were no designs, pre-drawing or agreement of what it was going to be, just an exchange of emails containing images to determine what we did and didn't like and then they just turned up as appointed and did it over a few days.
As it turned out, I LOVE it.
Here's what it looked like beforehand. A vast improvement, I'm sure you'll agree!
And for the past three years, people have occasionally headed over from the 'hip' side of town to check it out or take a pic.
That was until about four weeks ago...
We were having dinner with family friends, and at precisely 12.14am, two IDIOTS came out of the laneway gloom and signed their tags on our art!!
How do I know this?
Not just because of the orange tags we discovered in permanent marker, but because we have security cameras that aren't hiding!! Look - here's one of them in action. Seriously, how stupid could you be? She even looks directly into the camera at one point as if to say, 'oh... there's a security camera....'
Contacting the company that organised the original commission, it took them just a day or two to reach out to their community and have the tags identified. They apparently had words with the culprits, before assuring me that they won't be back. They're also arranging for the repair (at my expense, but it's not their fault, and more importantly, I don't want others to think that desecrating artwork is okay, and add more tags - so am keen to have it fixed.)
And no, tempting as it was, I haven't asked for names. I have no idea of the protocol among street art peeps - but they didn't offer, so I didn't ask. However, I did say that if they are speaking to them again, they might want to let them know the police are also looking for them and similarly, are using the tags to work out who they are - along with very clear security footage.
I mean really, what kind of idiot commits an act of vandalism under lights, with security cameras - and leaves an identifiable name?
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