Jack Shadbolt, City of Vancouver, Public Art Registry [online] accessed September 12, 2017
One panel of a completed 15 hand-painted posters of the primavera theme, the collective works come to form a mosaic-like mural. This series was based off of a large work completed for UBC’s Okanagan campus in the Ballroom inside the University Centre.
On this series, Shadbolt explains: “What better than a great ‘primavera’ for Spring to cheer the spirit? And what more impressive than a large sculptural relief in full colour? And what more poetically exuberant as a permanent symbol than two splendid butterflies breaking from the white cocoon of Spring - the one on the left an abstraction of pieces coming together to form the insect and the one on the right a full-fledged realization? It is hoped that once the mind is focussed in this direction a certain transformational process is suggested and with it certain mythological overtones might unfold. The cocoon may then become the violet and white mythic egg from which Spring is born. The symbolic bird and flowers now become the guardians of this ritual birth of new life, this PRIMAVERA.”
