Watch This Spanish Artist Paint a Giant, Mind-Bending Mural at HoMA

See Cinta Vidal in action at the Honolulu Museum of Art now through Feb. 18 as part of Pow! Wow! Hawai‘i 2017.

February 15, 2017

Lesa Griffith,

Editor’s Note: Through our partnership with the Honolulu Museum of Art, HONOLULU Magazine publishes a monthly blog written by Lesa Griffith, the museum’s communications director and a talented Hawai‘i writer on arts, culture and food.

Photo: Courtesy of Honolulu Museum of Art/Shuzo Uemoto

Now through Saturday, Feb. 18, you can see Spanish artist Cinta Vidal working on a new mural, titled Blow, at the Honolulu Museum of Art, as part of this year’s Pow! Wow! Hawai‘i. Diners at the museum’s café have a front-row seat to view the artist as she clambers on scaffolding.

Vidal is the third artist—all of them handpicked by Pow! Wow! Worldwide’s Jasper Wong and Thinkspace Gallery’s Andrew Hosner—to tackle this “canvas” in the museum’s Luce Courtyard.

Photos: Courtesy of Cinta Vidal

Born in Barcelona, Vidal studied illustration at Escola Massana, and cut her teeth painting large, elaborate backdrops for opera, theater and ballet during her apprenticeship at Taller de Escenografía Castells Planas.

Now an accomplished illustrator, painter and mural artist, Vidal is known for her M.C. Escher-like merging of differing perspectives. She says she’s proud to be in Hawai‘i as part of the Pow! Wow! crew and painting at HoMA.

“When I have a wall, I always want to paint something related with the surrounding environment,” she says of Blow, which features objects, some of them found in the museum, flying off into space. “The Hawaiian culture is something fascinating for me and my idea is to give light to it, and value some elements and objects around and inside the museum and make them float. I like the idea of trying to make them look like they’re flying and traversing the walls of the museum as if something was blowing them around.”

Vidal selected the objects in the mural—including paintings by Monet and Gauguin—by perusing the museum’s website. “I choose them by intuition—some objects have something special that attracts me,” she explains. “But the principal element is a canoe. That doesn’t come from the museum, but I think it is a strong Hawaiian symbol, so I wanted to put it as the central object. I also added a rooster, because it is an animal with a lot of presence in the Islands.”

See Cinta Vidal in action: February 13–18

Lesa Griffith is director of communications at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Born in Honolulu, one of her early seminal art experiences was at the Honolulu Museum of Art, when on a field trip her high school art history teacher pointed out that the ermine cape in Whistler’s Portrait of Lady Meux was not just a cape—it was visual signage leading viewers’ eyes through the painting.