Courtside mural draws inspiration from Springfield community

If you’ve had a chance to visit the basketball courts at Silver Jubilee Park, you will know it is hard to miss the large-scale, bright, sports-themed mural on display.

Designed and executed by Brisbane-based artist, Gus Eagleton, the mural features realistic paintings of basketball players with a surrealist twist.

If you are already familiar with Gus’ work, you will understand that he has no shortage of talent. From small compositions to expansive murals that go up to 30 metres high and 200 metres long, Gus has exhibited nationwide and abroad, receiving a collection of awards in recognition of his artistic flair.

Creating a design for a large-scale mural is certainly no easy feat. The process, which began earlier in 2023, saw Gus collaborating with students from Mastery Schools Australia (MSA) to curate the perfect design for our local community.

“For this project, I was approached by Vee Design to do a community mural for the new Jubilee Park, basketball courts,” Gus said. “The MSA students and I sat down and we did a bunch of sketching and a bunch of collages, and we came up with ideas relating to Springfield and the new park.”

After running a workshop at MSA, it was back to the drawing board for Gus, who spent a lot of time in Springfield going on nature hikes to not only get a feel for the local area, but to draw inspiration from its nature and surrounding amenities.

“After that, I developed concepts with the students’ content, bouncing off Vee Design’s playground design, the colours they were using and the colours from the basketball court. I created a piece that’s going to complement the space and something that the kids are going to enjoy and interact with.”

Sharyn Angell, Principal of Springfield’s MSA campus said the collaboration was a great way to show students that a career in art is possible.

“We selected a group of students from our school who have demonstrated a passion and strength in art,” Sharyn said. “They met with Gus and were given some background information about the project as well as an overview of some of Gus' artwork. The students were asked to first discuss their ideas and then given time to draw, sketch, collage and further talk through their ideas for the community artwork with Gus. It was a fantastic experience for these students to get to spend time with an accomplished artist and to see that their particular area of strength could translate into a career in art. It was also great for them to share their ideas with the possibility of their ideas coming to life in the community art piece.”

You can check out the mural designed by Gus in collaboration with MSA’s students by visiting the basketball courts at Silver Jubilee Park, located at 7002 Russell Luhrs Way Spring Mountain QLD 4124.