Guido Van Helten is street artist and muralist from Brisbane who travels the world painting large scale photo-realistics. His portraits can be found everywhere from a restricted zone in Chernobyl to his largest work; a monochrome mural depicting four farmers on a grain silo at Brim, in Victoria’s rural north-east.
- This was the first of a six silo project that now comprises Victoria’s 200km Wimmera-Mallee Silo Art Trail which he completed in early 2016.
- Other images featured above are from a side street in Richmond and a skate park mural in Canberra.
Van Helten was commissioned to be part of a series of murals for the Melbourne Polytechnic and he worked with profoundly deaf contemporary dancer Anna Seymour to create a striking seven-storey portrait of her on the exterior of the Polytechnic’s campus in High Street, Windsor. (Seymour is well known to the deaf community, teaching Diploma courses in Auslan).
The collaboration by Seymour and Van Helten was engineered by street art management agency Juddy Roller; and began with a photo shoot in Collingwood with Seymour improvising poses inspired by the architecture of the building. Van Helten then transferred the image to the wall using only spray paint, acrylics, paint brushes and a large cherry picker.