Once a week, you can find Helen Wilding and friends sitting on the side of the road, pens in hand. This time she’s perched on a tiny folding stool between a couple of pot plants, focusing intently on a plant nursery. It appears to be shut.
Wilding has been sketching this same street in inner Melbourne for seven years. Stretching for a couple of kilometres through Fitzroy, one of Melbourne’s oldest suburbs, Brunswick Street has everything – cafes, pubs, homes, churches, markets, shops and a branch of the legendary A1 Lebanese bakery.
Wilding has almost filled her long strip of paper, capturing most of the block. It’s folded into sections like an accordion, its edges pulled by the wind. A fire truck barrels past with its siren blaring, followed by a couple of trams rumbling in both directions, blocking the view. It’s a regular occurrence for someone who sketches on location. “Sometimes you’re sitting there and a truck comes and sits in front of you and won’t move for two hours,” she says.
Wilding describes herself as an introvert, but the project has become a locus for a little community. Scattered in the surrounding streets are other sketchers, recording little bits of Fitzroy. A few people stop to chat, including tourists who take a photo for social media.
“I met the man who owned Polyester,” Wilding says, referring to the record shop a couple of doors down from the nursery. “I gave him a sketch.” Once, a person who lived in the building she was sketching came to look at her work, Wilding says, and told her the names they had given for all the pigeons on the roof. They made it into the sketch.
Wilding has lived in the area for a couple of decades, regularly taking a tram down Brunswick Street to her job as a librarian. That occupation helps explain some of her approach – there’s incredible attention to detail in her sketches. They include shop signs and people, quick strokes for antennas and individual bricks. Murals that are faded in real life are also faded in the sketches; the colours capture the changing leaves. The only thing Wilding won’t include is graffiti – street art is in, but she hates vandalism.
That isn’t to say the sketches are perfect. “There’s heaps of things in these drawings that are wrong,” Wilding says, “but they get lost in the details.” She picks up a finished line drawing to point out where she made a mistake on the facade: “My friend Joe says there are no eyebrows on this one.” She had to add an extra piece of paper to another sketch after she misjudged how tall one of the buildings was.
Alf Green, 85, is sitting on a stool in a side street, sketching an old wooden doorway as the cars whip by. He started sketching about 10 years ago, when he lived in a small country town. “I went over to the next town, and there was an artist society. I asked if I could join, thinking I could learn a lot about colour and composition.”
Soon, Green got “sucked in” to the hobby. “I did a search and found there was going to be a meeting of sketchers in one of the suburbs of Melbourne,” he says, a group that was organised by Wilding. He now travels more than an hour every week to sketch with the others. At lunchtime, they meet up to “share a parma and a pot” and show each other what they have sketched.
The line drawings take Wilding four to six hours to complete, which can stretch out over multiple weeks. She then paints them at home in bright, vivid colours – not always true to life, but capturing the feeling of being there. She doesn’t always paint them right away, and there’s a collection of finished line sketches waiting for colour at home, dutifully filed by street number in a cupboard.
Sketching used to be a travel activity for Wilding. “When you travel and you draw, you notice different things,” she says. “You are looking up.” When you take the same route every day, it starts to slide by – she mentions another famous Melbourne painting, Collins St, 5p.m. by John Brack.
Sketching has become a way for Wilding to properly absorb what’s in her own back yard. “I still feel like I don’t know it that well. I still feel like I’m exploring.”
Her drawings are also a record of how the street has changed. Sketches she did during the Covid lockdowns show closed shops and signs for cancelled events and Black Lives Matter protests. In one sketch, you can see her friend across the street – they couldn’t be any closer due to social distancing rules.
Right behind where Wilding is sitting today used to be another plant nursery with colourful gates. When she heard it was going to be demolished, she made a special trip to paint them (pictured above). It’s now an apartment building.
The street may change, but Wilding and her friends will be back next week.
“It doesn’t sound much, saying I’m going to draw an entire street. But it’s a long project,” Wilding says. “It could take me 10 more years.”
• You can follow Helen Wilding’s streetscape project on her website.
