GUYSBOROUGH — When Kelly Harnish put the final brush stroke on his sprawling mural at the Guysborough waterfront last week, he didn’t feel triumph. Or even relief.
“I had a profound sadness,” he said. “As much as I’m glad that this is done... I’m going to miss it.”
He had good reason. Since the spring, the retired high school art teacher from Little Dover has been labouring over what has become one of the most ambitious creative projects of his life. More than 450 hours of work – “from the time I sat down with a pad and started sketching ideas” – went into the massive piece, which now fills one of two walls bordering the municipality’s wastewater facility on Main St.
But even that number, he suggested, barely touches the surface. It doesn’t count the weeks he spent mulling over character, composition, emotion and tone. It doesn’t capture the solitary hours in the summer heat, or the long evenings reimagining scenes he had just painted, again and again.
“I gave this a tremendous amount of thought,” he said. “Even as I was progressing, the next image was evolving. I had an idea, but as I was finishing one scene or one portrait, the other one was kind of evolving in my head and changing. So, it was an ongoing creation... At some point you just abandon [mapping]. I wanted to do more work on the map, but I’m like, okay, this map’s fine like it is.”
If there’s a faint tone of resignation in his voice, there’s also reflection – and a deep sense of personal transformation.
“This has been one of the best summers I’ve spent in a long time,” he said. “A wonderful experience… an experience of personal growth. I didn’t realize that when I began.”
The project, itself, began long before the first brush strokes – part of a broader effort to revitalize the downtown area and waterfront, supported by the Municipality of the District of Guysborough (MODG), ArtWorks East and provincial funders, including the Nova Scotia Wellness Fund and the GFL Green Fund.
As ArtWorks East President Jack Leonard said earlier this year: “We’ve been encouraged by [MODG] Councillor Paul Long, and Glen Avery [MODG’s director of public works]… We’ve had donations, including a generous one from the Guysborough District Business Partnership… The murals timed well with the upcoming revitalization.”
In the initiative, Harnish was joined by fellow ArtWorks East member Moni Duersch, whose aquatic-themed mural – featuring fish, sea creatures and community-crafted designs – forms the other half of the installation. Duersch, for her part, has called her experience “amazing. People love it [exactly] because it’s bright and colourful and inclusive.”
Artistically, the working partnership proved especially valuable.
“We absolutely helped one another,” Harnish said. “Working alongside another artist was absolutely awesome. Everything I did before I was either the leader or working solo. It was so comforting just to walk over and say, ‘Moni, can you come have a look at this…?’”
In other ways, too, the project was as much about the process as the finished product. Harnish’s wall, which now features a cultural and historical timeline of settlement in Guysborough County, came together slowly, deliberately and, for the most part, entirely on his own.
“My mural… I had to include a map of the municipality, and I had to do a historical cultural timeline of the settlers of Guysborough County, which there are a lot,” he said. “I covered the Indigenous. I covered… mostly France and England. And then in the centre are two loyalist soldiers… both Black and white. And then the African Canadian girl represents the descendants of the Africans. And then the fisherman at the end, because most people came here for the fishery… My main goal when I did these portraits was to create a mood… so people, when they looked at them, they could kind of feel how they were feeling at the time.”
That wasn’t easy. Still, he said, “I think in the end, I did end up capturing that. A lot of the feedback I got from people echoed that, so it confirmed that in me. The tourists and the people [of] Guysborough would just walk by at the same time and just give you the encouragement, motivation you need to just get through those days.”
That feedback – unsolicited, spontaneous, sometimes from strangers – affected him more than he expected.
“There [have] been benefits to this that I didn’t foresee when I began,” he said. “A lot of people in Guysborough County over the summer I otherwise never would have put a face to… If you’re not in the public, you could go a lifetime and not meet, even in Guysborough, somebody just down around the corner.”
It wasn’t the first time Harnish has painted on this scale. He previously completed murals for the Discovery Centre in Halifax and the Municipality of West Hants. He also led “at least 12 to 15 groups of Grade 12 students through large [murals]” during his teaching career. But this one was different.
“This was probably the most significant part of my life every day for four or five months,” he said. “I do feel quite blessed to have had the opportunity to do this.”
Harnish is now looking forward to catching up on postponed chores and preparing to teach art workshops in the winter through ArtWorks East. But the mural – and the community it brought together – will remain with him.
“I’m going to miss that,” he said again. “You see the end… and you look and you’re waiting to get to that end, but when you get to the end, there’s a feeling of sadness.”
For now, though, that sadness feels earned. And, in its own quiet way – like the murals themselves – even beautiful.
