Silo Art Trail RAPANYUP

A road trip with Jo after 40+ years. Jo was often in Melbourne visiting her grandchildren but the most we got together was a meal, so when I decided to do the Silo Art trail in the Wimmera I gave her a call and it fitted in with Natal's 8th birthday.
The Silo Art  Trail started after the interest shown in the Silo painted in BRIM in Victoria Wimmera Mallee region.

So we headed off on Thursday to Rapanyup about 3 hours away. Had a little diversion avoiding Ballarat but were back on track again.
Rapanyup has a population of only 550 people so will take a while to cope with the influx of tourists 

                                       

Cafes and shops are often closed in these now quiet towns
This was a very basic store!

This General store had a HUGE collection of teapots!

The china teapot collection.

Rupanyup’s silo is the work of Russian mural artist, Julia Volchkova, who turned her attention to the town’s youth and their great love of team sport. The work vividly captures the spirit of community and provides an accurate insight into rural youth culture. 

The featured faces are those of Rupanyup residents and local sporting team members, Ebony Baker and Jordan Weidemann. Fresh-faced and dressed in their sports attire (netball and Australian Rules football,  Baker and Weidemann embody a youthful spirit of strength, hope and camaraderie.                                                                                                                                     Rendered onto a pair of squat conjoined Australian Grain Export steel grain silos, the delicately nuanced monochromatic work is typical of Volchkova’s realist portraiture style.                       

Accomplished over several weeks and unveiled in early 2017, the mural quietly honours the integral role that sport and community play in rural Australian populations.        

All of the Silos are just at the side of the highway (Henty or Sunraysia) as the roads were usually beside the rail line that used to carry the grain.
These were steel ones (the only steel ones on the trail ) and behind the silos was the old railway station building now deserted.

Julia Volchkova was born in Nizhnevartovsk, Siberia (Russia) and studied classical painting there before moving to Saint Petersburg in 2010. Heavily influenced by Russian realist painter Ilya Repin, Volchkova’s delicate portraiture seeks to explore the rich diversity present in the places that she visits. 
She describes being honoured dot be the fist woman to be asked to do the silos 

"All my equipment weighs a lot. The safety protection weighs several kilograms, the spray gun is a few pounds, the paint itself, rollers, sprays, brushes — all of this is very heavy."Then there were the challenges of painting outdoors for two weeks with the changing weather and in particular, the wind."The paint flies in the wrong direction and lands on your face," Ms Volchkova said.

The scale of the project was obvious at each place we visited