A Painted Green Mural

[February 2026]

Working on "Green Mural" at Café May in Thủ Dầu Một, Vietnam.

Dear friends, family and collectors,

At the end of January I was given the opportunity to paint a mural at a friend's café here in Thủ Dầu Một. I felt quite inspired after painting my first mural last year and found myself dreaming up a whole series of single-colour, nature-inspired murals. I kept to only one colour (which was quite an achievement for me😅) and played with shapes and motifs which tend to show up in my canvas and paper works as well: mound-like mountains, fluffy clouds, creeping tropical-inspired plants and so on. I chose a simplified approach both in colour and design to make sure that I would be able to execute the design on a large scale. My friend loved the Green Mural doodle that I made last year, and so I dreamed up something similar for one of the walls in her café.

Mural dreams from last year. Watercolour paint on 300gsm BaoHong Watercolour Paper. 2025.

 The green one has been transformed into a real mural. Hopefully the rest will follow🌞

The Green Mural consists of two layers of slightly different greens. I used a heavily diluted mixture of phthalo green and deep yellow for the first layer. I began with a central cloud-like shape, allowing the rest of the shapes to grow out from and form around it. I drew inspiration from daily walks in my local park with my dog, Sam. Lush green fleshy plants are plentiful there; lotuses abound, water-lilies of all sizes and colours dot the smaller streams and ferns of all shapes and sizes pop-up everywhere like weeds, not to mention the creeping plants and ferns which grow on trees (gorgeous!). Just as a side note, I have taken so many photos of lotus leaves as they drift upon the surface of the water. The upper surface of their leaves are very waxy, so water pools in perfect roundish or oblong shaped blobs: all of which is much fodder for the imagination. I wanted all of these green and fresh impressions to flow into the mural, bringing a part of the lush Vietnamese tropical countryside into my friend's café.

Above: Cà phê muối (Vietnamese Salted Coffee) is one my favourite Vietnamese coffees.

Below: Process shots of me painting at Café May. Photo credits for bottom middle and bottom right to Ms. Trang.

I find myself more and more drawn to public art. I have always been an admirer of large scale public murals and hold a great love for public sculptures and installations. I enjoy the accessibility, both physically and conceptually, of work intended for public spaces. It is a very direct way of showing the impact which art and artworks can have on the feeling-tone and atmosphere of a space. Whether the piece may be intended to beautify a space or to challenge commonly held societal perceptions, it usually does so with a visual language that is direct and easily understood by everyone, creating space for pause, curiosity and dialogue (even if only on an internal level). I really like this.

I mean, just look at those water blobs😍

I made a small watercolour sketch a few days before I began the mural, just to get my thoughts flowing in the right direction, but ended up diverging from the sketch quite a bit. I am most comfortable with a brief or a project which doesn't have a predetermined outcome, as it allows me to respond to the space and change the design as needed while I am painting. One of the biggest developments was the level of detail which came out in the second layer of the mural. I didn't initially intend for it to be so detailed, but once I began and saw that it was working I decided that it would be worth the hours needed to complete it. The detail added a layer of depth to the mural which I am very pleased with.

The second layer of the mural is highly detailed and painted in a darker shade of green.

The decorative patterns which emerged pay homage to traditional Vietnamese tile and wrought iron designs; motifs which I have photographed and written about again and again over the past few years. I love the way in which the creative process transforms and transmutes all of the things which we experience and see and touch and sense, incorporating all that came before so that something new and unique can emerge. What a deeply poetic and beautiful process.

Green Mural (2026).

May many more public space projects find their way to me😍. Here’s to many more murals!🥂🥂🥂

As always, thank you for being here. May you have a wonderful week ahead!

All my love,

Nicola

PS. As always, if you enjoyed my musings and know of anyone who might also enjoy my ramblings please forward my newsletter to them, your support will be greatly appreciated. I would also love to hear from you. So any responses or comments or creative stories of your own that you might have and would like to share with me, please simply reply to this email.  

PPS. I know it is a Brave New World when I need to start ending off my newsletters with the statement that this newsletter was fully written by me using my fallible human mind and fingers (hands?). I have never, and will never use AI to write it for me, as the writing of these newsletters serve as a kind of month-in-review for me, and that is invaluable. Same goes for my artwork and illustrations. All images, photographs, illustrations and artworks which you see in my newsletters were created by me, by hand in the real world.