Granville Island, Vancouver, BC, Canada / January 2016

I took this photo within an hour of leaving the Polar Bear Swim at English Bay (photo #24) on New Year’s Day. Louise and I took the Sea Bus from under Granville Street Bridge, across False Creek, to Granville Island. These six giant silos belong to Ocean Concrete, who’ve had their cement mixing plant there since 1917, the oldest and largest tenant on Granville Island.

Granville Island is a huge tourist attraction and is famous for its Granville Island Market, where you can buy all kinds of produce, fish, meats, seafood, vegetables, fruit, baked goods, ice cream, coffee, etc. etc. It’s also home to the Arts Club Theatre. There are many other attractions there too, including great restaurants.

Back in 2014, two Brazilian twin brothers, Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, gained international attention for designing a FIFA World Cup Soccer Boeing 737 for their national soccer team. They are also known as Os Gemeos (Portuguese for ‘The Twins’). They are graffiti artists that were born in 1974 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. They were commissioned to paint Ocean’s six cement silos as part of a Vancouver Biennale Arts Project. Their influences and characters are from a hip-hop style and Brazilian culture. They basically transformed these grey concrete silos into a piece of public art that was their biggest work to that date (2014) – towering 21 metres high. They named their creation – “Giants”.

I was fortunate to capture the late day sun beaming in on them from the island’s west side. Four of their backs face the waters of False Creek and downtown Vancouver. According to Wikipedia, their murals often feature yellow-skinned characters – taken from the yellow tinge both of the twins have in their dreams. There’s a long list of public art features they have created on Wikipedia’s write-up.

Interestingly for my readers of  ‘Confessions of a Weekend Dad’, I have mentioned how there’s a massive native gravel pit in Sechelt, on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. A lot of that gravel crosses underneath the Sunshine Coast Highway via a conveyer belt and goes directly into waiting barges that are then towed into downtown Vancouver. Ocean Concrete would be one of their destinations and those six silos are filled with that gravel. From there its used to make the concrete most of Vancouver’s high rise buildings are made from.