Reading passage
On the corner of Peel Street in the northern quarter of Manchester, passers-by often stop to watch a woman in a paint-splattered jacket working high up on a brick wall. Her name is Dana Ruiz, and for the past six years she has been one of the most recognisable street artists in the north of England. Her murals, which show oversized birds and flowers set against bright geometric backgrounds, have turned several grey walls into local landmarks.
Ruiz did not train at an art college. She studied graphic design at a local technical school and spent ten years working in an advertising agency, drawing posters on a computer screen. In the evenings she painted small canvases at home, but she felt that her pictures were hidden away where almost nobody could see them. Everything changed in 2017, when the city council invited artists to decorate a row of empty shops. Ruiz offered to paint one shutter for free, and the shopkeeper liked the result so much that he asked her to cover the whole front of his store.
Since then she has completed more than forty murals across the city. She funds most of them herself, although local businesses sometimes pay for the paint and the hire of a small platform. A single wall can take between two days and three weeks, depending on its size and the weather. Rain is her greatest enemy, because fresh acrylic paint cannot be applied to a wet surface, and strong wind makes it dangerous to work on a ladder or scaffold.
Ruiz begins each project by talking to the people who live nearby. She asks them what images they would like to see every day, and she sketches their ideas in a notebook before combining them into a single design. On Peel Street, for example, residents asked for a kingfisher because the birds had recently returned to a cleaned-up canal behind the shops. The finished mural shows the bird diving across the whole wall, with each feather painted in a slightly different shade of blue and green.
Her working method is unusually disciplined for a street artist. She projects her sketch onto the wall at night, outlines it in chalk the following morning, and then fills in the colour in broad sections, always working from the top of the wall downwards so that drips fall onto unfinished areas. The final details, such as the eye of a bird or the veins of a leaf, are added with brushes barely wider than a pencil.
Not everyone approves of her work. Some critics argue that street art, even when it is legal and commissioned, encourages illegal graffiti in other parts of the city. They point to a sharp rise in tagging, the practice of writing a name in spray paint, that followed the first wave of murals. Ruiz answers this by running free Saturday workshops for teenagers, where she teaches them to design on paper and to ask permission before painting anywhere. According to the council, reported tagging in the streets around her murals has actually fallen by about thirty percent since the workshops began.
The murals have also brought measurable benefits to the area. A small survey carried out by the local university found that footfall on Peel Street rose by a fifth in the year after the kingfisher mural was finished, and two new cafes opened on the street. Estate agents admit that photographs of the murals now appear regularly in their advertisements, although they insist that this has little effect on rents.
Ruiz herself is cautious about the attention. She still refuses to sell postcards of her murals, saying that the walls belong to the neighbourhood and not to her. Nevertheless, she has begun to plan her most ambitious project yet: a series of twelve connected walls along the canal towpath, one for each month of the year. If the council approves the plan, painting will begin next spring, and once again the people of Manchester will be able to watch a blank wall slowly turn into a picture.