When the Whales Were Painted Over (and What We Replace Them With)

 🌊 When the Whales Were Painted Over (and What We Replace Them With)

When I came home from Mexico, I found something I wasn’t expecting.

Someone had graffitied over my murals of whales. Across the paint, someone had written “nuke the whales.”

It wasn’t just damage — it felt like a message. A dismissal of something living, something connected to the ocean and the coast.

So I responded the only way I knew how.

I painted over it.

A large orca rose up across the wall. Not as decoration, but as reclamation. A way of saying that even when something is attacked or erased, it can still return in another form.

But that moment didn’t feel isolated. It connected to something larger I had already been noticing.

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🌍 From Whales to Walls — What Gets Covered Over

Across the West Coast, especially in places like Vancouver and White Rock, there have been many large public murals of whales and ocean life — including the well-known Wyland Whaling Walls, part of a global series of around 100 murals painted in the 1980s and 1990s.

These murals were meant to celebrate the ocean. Orcas, humpbacks, grey whales — painted directly onto buildings as public reminders of marine life.

But public walls don’t stay fixed.

Over time, many of these murals have been:

• painted over during renovations
• removed when buildings are redeveloped
• partially hidden by new construction
• left to fade without restoration

Even in White Rock, the Grey Whale mural near the waterfront (1980s) has changed over time with repainting and weathering.

What was once meant to be lasting becomes temporary when the surface beneath it changes.

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⚽ When Bigger Narratives Take the Wall

I also think about another kind of covering-over.

In some places, murals that once existed on buildings have been removed or altered when large international events come in — including situations where branding, advertising, or redevelopment takes priority over existing artwork.

One example people often point to is how FIFA-related branding and infrastructure in host cities can reshape public surfaces — replacing older murals or visual culture with official event imagery, sponsorships, or temporary installations.

Whether intentional or not, the result is the same: older images disappear to make room for newer, larger systems of visibility.

And what gets removed is often what had local meaning — community art, environmental imagery, or place-based storytelling.

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🐋 The Pattern: Erasure and Replacement

So when my own whale mural was graffitied, it didn’t feel like an isolated act.

It felt like part of a repeating pattern:

• whale murals fading or being painted over
• public art disappearing through redevelopment
• local imagery replaced by larger commercial or institutional narratives
• even sports or global events temporarily rewriting visual space

Different scales, same outcome:
something gets covered.

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🎨 The Orca That Stayed

So I painted the orca back into the wall.

Not to preserve what was lost, but to respond to it.

Because walls are never neutral. They carry whatever we allow to remain on them.

And sometimes the act of painting is not about creating something new — but about refusing disappearance.

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🌿 Reflective Questions

• What kinds of images get preserved in public space, and which get erased?
• Who decides when a mural stays or goes — the community, the owner, or the developer?
• Are public walls cultural memory, or real estate surfaces?
• What happens when local stories are replaced by larger global branding?

public art, mural graffiti, whale murals Vancouver, Wyland Whaling Walls, orca art, White Rock murals, Vancouver redevelopment, FIFA branding, public space, cultural erasure, environmental art, urban change, coastal identity, street art response

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#PublicArt #WhaleArt #Orca #VancouverArt #WhiteRockBC #StreetArt #UrbanChange #CulturalMemory #EnvironmentalArt #MuralArt #ArtAndPlace #CoastalIdentity

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