Grand designs for historic pub once run by Leeds United legend Peter L:orimer

Yorkshire Evening Post

The Commercial on Sweet Street, which was once run by Leeds United legend Peter Lorimer, has been transformed into a striking new cultural landmark thanks to a mural by Kid Acne.

Transcript

00:00Final shipping forecast is due for the Met Office at 2343 on Saturday the 18th.

00:07They're all in the go.

00:10What I loved about painting on a large scale was just the immediacy of it and the energy

00:14and that really comes down to using spray paint.

00:16So I loved the fact that I could take a drawing and transpose that onto a large scale in a short amount of time.

00:24My name's Kid Acne. I'm an artist, illustrator, printmaker, MC.

00:30I've spent my whole adult life in Sheffield.

00:35This current project is in Leeds, two elevations of the commercial pub in Holbeck.

00:41Because the building's got all these obstacles, all that kind of fed into how I broke the composition down

00:49to make it manageable so that I could make a lot of those things disappear.

00:54For me now, when I'm painting on a big scale like this mural, I'm really trying to keep that same energy

01:02and that same rawness of the original sketch and that's the hardest bit of it.

01:13These characters, they go back to kind of like mid-90s.

01:17Stylistically, it kind of comes from my drawings as a kid.

01:21And the headdresses, that was inspired by the Maurice Sendak book, Where the Wild Things Are.

01:27The kids in animal costumes, it was a good way of showing different emotions, different sort of temperaments.

01:34Yeah, each individual character, in its own right, is probably the size of a regular piece that I paint.

01:41So to have that many of them in a row, yeah, it's been really cool to do and see them as kind of like an army

01:48of different personalities from different walks of life.

01:52It's just been such a positive experience.

01:54They've got a banner of text running through the middle, positive energy activates, constant elevation.

02:00You know, all these northern cities, they're just an hour apart.

02:03If you grew up painting graffiti or being into street art, there was a network of artists in between all these cities.

02:10And for me, I felt that's the equivalent of like northeast, southwest London.

02:13But yeah, it's really nice to sort of bridge that gap a little bit more.

02:16And projects like this are a good way of doing that.

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