A graffiti artist was reduced to tears after discovering two days' work on a new play area he'd painted for kids at an Auckland community centre had mistakenly been destroyed by the council.
Jesse Jensen, better known by his street artist moniker Ares Artifex, had been commissioned to design and paint a children's activity board for Community Waitākere in west Auckland.
"It's fun - it's a little path that goes through a park, and on the path we're painting an artwork and it's got, like, retro racing and a start line. And then there's like 'hop on one foot', then 'run backwards', 'hop on the stars' and all that," he explained.
"I started painting it last week, I was like two days in. I designed it, then started with the basics, and then I was going to come back this week and put all the details on it."
But when he arrived at the centre the next week, he discovered the artwork had been water blasted off. Auckland Council's graffiti removal team had come to the site and destroyed it.
Jensen said it left him in tears.
"I was crying, man. When I went in there and saw it I was like, this is just heartbreaking," he told Newshub.
"Ninety percent of my work has already been destroyed as a street artist and graffiti artist. Now I don't paint illegally at all. The last time I painted illegally was like 2015… and yet I'm still having to put up with this bullshit.
"It's just like, can't they just go away? Leave us alone. This is the most kid-friendly, sterile thing I've ever painted. I don't understand how anyone could be offended by it, and they're still out there destroying it."
Auckland Council's manager of business delivery, Grant Muir, told Newshub he was made aware of Jensen's complaint on Wednesday afternoon.
"I rang him immediately to apologise and discuss the issue in more detail," he told Newshub.
"We explained that we had received a complaint from a member of the public regarding graffiti on a footpath and that council contractors were sent to remove it via water blasting, as is the normal process."
Muir admits the removal was a mistake. He says it was caused by the council not being notified of the artwork being commissioned, and by a delay between Jensen receiving permission to do the artwork and it being undertaken due to the COVID-19 lockdown.
"These factors resulted in the artwork being removed in error. We again apologise to Jesse for the upset that this has caused him," he said.
"We are working through this with Local Board Services and the council's resolutions team to look at the overall approval process to ensure better visibility of where artists may be working, what their project is and any aftercare requirements to hopefully prevent something like this happening again."
Jensen said while upsetting, the design was the most time-consuming part of the project, so repainting the destroyed artwork won't take as long to do as it did the first time round.
"Now that I know how to do it, I can probably repeat it in a few hours," he said. "I guess it's more that it's just painful."
Jensen says he'll return to finish the project next week.
