REFLECTION

LOCATION: New York, NY, USA

The mural is 44 m high x 52 m wide and covers 2,290 square meters. It took 210 liters of paint and spray paint to realize the piece. It is the biggest mural ever painted in New York City.

The project was based on child labor and child slavery was something that was actually very, very important to me. It’s the kind of project that I want to be involved in. I wanted to find a way where I can do multiple layers of children and I figured that the best way to do this was to do a portrait that was so large that the eyes would give an iris area (that would be about 1,5 meters/6 feet from side to side) large enough to paint images of other children.

We have this one child who is a white caucasian child and then we have other children from the third world who were actually photographed at the moment when they were rescued. We have different layers to this situation; one child who is probably safe, whilst there is child trafficking going on in New York City as we speak. We can’t assume that it’s just a problem from somewhere else, there’s also a problem in our own backyards. I think that’s how the final design came about. The idea of the green, the grass, and the flowers, is this utopian idea of what childhood should be and the fact that this isn’t always the case. And I like the fact that this is juxtaposed to the concrete jungle, to all the brick and cement in the city.”