Spencer Bennett
Untitled No. 3089
Carytown, Richmond, 2022
Mixed media on brick
On view
Northbank Partners, 3463 West Cary Street, Richmond, Virginia
Northbank Partners is a multigenerational financial planning firm at 3463 West Cary Street in Carytown. Beside the office they keep a Monarch Waystation, a garden of milkweed for the caterpillars in summer and nectar plants for the adults heading south in the fall. Monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed and almost nothing else, and the eastern population has fallen by about 80 percent since the 1990s. The ones born here at the end of summer fly to the mountains of central Mexico, close to 3,000 miles. The garden is right on the sidewalk, and hundreds of people walk past it every day.
Carytown is full of murals, and the monarch butterfly is one of the most painted subjects on walls anywhere. Search for butterfly murals, and the same picture comes up over and over. Carytown deserves better than one more generic butterfly mural. The job was to find something new to say with a subject everyone has already painted.
Northbank came to me wanting the monarch’s life cycle on the wall. I took that as the starting point and built on it.
The mural is about the interconnectedness of all living things, and the monarch and its milkweed are only an example. All life on Earth has hidden connections if you look for them. A monarch cannot live without milkweed, and milkweed cannot seed without the insects that visit it. The mural puts those connections back together, out of the life in this one garden.
I started with photographs of the garden and reference photographs of monarchs and milkweed at every stage of life. I trained a model on all of them to look for the hidden patterns in the life of the
waystation. Those are the shapes a plant and a butterfly have in common. The patterns became the foundation of the mural, and I drew and painted every form by hand.
The same work continued inside. The prints on the office walls and the moving version on the screen came from the same images. The mural was finished in May 2022.