The new mural painted by Mercedes Minck hopes to convey the best of Prince George

By Tommy Osborne

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Jan 22, 2025 | 4:11 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – A new mural has been completed at the CN Centre. Painted by local artist Mercedes Minck, she says her inspiration behind the design was showcasing the best of Prince George and northern B.C.

“I think that the obvious thing to do at the CN Centre would have been a hockey mural, or someone was like ‘you should do a mean grizzly bear eating a hockey puck.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know if that’s really most people’s experience of Prince George.’ I thought it would be kind of cool to do something that incorporated more just general stories of people experiencing Prince George,” Minck said.

Mercedes Minck and her completed mural.

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For her, she believed the best way to represent Prince George was its nature and wildlife, something that just about everyone sees and takes part in in our community. She explained nature is something she’s always been passionate about, so she also wanted to portray what she, and many others, find wonderful about our community.

“I wanted to represent those aspects and those experiences that I’ve had here, where I’m connected to something small but vibrant,” Minck said.

“I really wanted I didn’t want to be niche, I wanted to be capturing a lot of experiences in Prince George in a general kind of natural way that takes a good look at the environment that we live in,” she continued, when explaining her focus on wanting to represent Prince George.

The owl is a key part of the mural. Minck explained it’s designed to have the audience’s eye follow the owl’s flight across the entirety of the mural, offering a visual story for any passerby.

The design work began in October, and Minck said she spent a bit over a week painting for 6-8 hours a day. While it took a lot of work, the finished product is certainly something both she and the CN Centre are proud of.

“For northern British Columbia, there are more people that come through our venue than any other, so to have an opportunity to showcase young artists like Mercedes is a wonderful opportunity for us, and she just did a remarkable job,” said the CN Centre’s Manager Glen Mikkelsen.

“I also think that Prince George sometimes gets a bad rap as a town and I just want to show the other experience of it that are good and positive and not just the negative stuff that you see in the media about not wanting to go through Prince George. People don’t know that we have beautiful things and we care about community and art, and I just want to foster that in Prince George,” Minck said.

The mural is all about community for Minck, and she says the fact she was painting in a public space with many people passing by made the experience quite special. She says she enjoyed chatting with people about her work, and she even got some help from children passing by to paint some fish.

“These little kids were painting and they were just blown away that they got to do it. My mom worked with one of the kids, and I guess when she went to work the next day, the kid’s mom was like, ‘he came home raving that he got to paint a fish. For the rest of his life, he’s going to be talking about how he helped paint this mural.’ So after that, any time I saw a little kid, I’d be like, ‘do you want to come paint this?’ Because I’m like what if I was that little kid, and that was a really formative experience that made me want to keep doing stuff like that, you know?” she said.

Minck said some children helped paint this fish, among others.

“Art is such a hard thing to get into, but it’s such a fun and rewarding thing that I wish more people could stick with it. So if I could help five little kids like painting, then that’s great to me,” she continued.

Minck explained the community also directly influenced the design, as she got some suggestions from friends and people passing by that made it into the final product.

“The bear was actually not in the original design. One of my friends who I met through walking around here, we were chatting and laughing about the mural and she said, ‘you know what it needs? It needs a garbage can at every house with a bear beside it.’ And I was like, ‘you’re right, we do need that.’ So the bear was not originally in it and was added in, and I think was a key addition from the crowd,” Minck said.

The bear Minck mentioned, which was not in the original design of the mural.

Minck has painted other murals, including at Lulu Lemon, Physio North, and the bike park in Mackenzie

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