La Petite Croix: Painting a Moment Before It Vanished

A few years ago I painted "La Petite Croix," a small café tucked into Sol Square, just south of Lichfield Street in the city. At the time, Sol Square was one of those inner-city laneways that had a real buzz to it, a converted warehouse precinct full of restaurants, bars, and cafés, the kind of place you'd duck into for a coffee or stay for the evening.

What caught my eye about La Petite Croix wasn't just the café itself, but the building's exterior. The whole front was covered in a heavy, decorative vinyl wallpaper, the sort of pattern you'd expect inside a French bistro, not plastered across an outside wall facing a laneway.

I spent years working as a painter and decorator before I was an artist, so my first reaction was something close to disbelief. Vinyl wallpaper, outdoors, exposed to the weather? It seemed like it shouldn't work. But it did. It gave the building a strange, theatrical charm, like a stage set dropped into the middle of the city. As an artist, I couldn't resist it. The colours, the texture, the slightly absurd boldness of the whole idea, it was simply too good not to paint.

So I painted it: the soft blue-and-pink wallpaper, the gold signage, the planter boxes, a couple of people deep in conversation at a table outside. Just an ordinary afternoon in the laneway.

I didn't know it at the time, but I'd painted a moment that was about to disappear.

Sol Square was badly damaged in the February 2011 earthquake and has sat empty ever since. The building in my painting is still standing, but the wallpaper is long gone, replaced by graffiti, and the laneway that used to hum with conversation and life is now a ghost town.

Looking at the painting now, it's become something more than a study of an odd and wonderful piece of exterior decorating. It's a record of a place as it was, a small, ordinary moment in a part of the city that doesn't exist in that form anymore.

That's part of what I love about painting from life: sometimes you're not just capturing a scene, you're quietly preserving it.