A Winnipeg painter’s immense social media following has put Ashern on the map for a mural she painted on the Vault.
Rachel Lancaster is a Winnipeg artist with more than 326,000 followers on Instagram, more than 198,000 followers on TikTok, and more than 109,000 followers on Facebook. On July 1, she posted a video showing a mural she painted on the outside of The Vault Cannabis Ashern, and the video garnered more than 105,000 views across the three platforms.
Lancaster spent a lot of time painting while working as an events coordinator. She got into doing the craft professionally after asking to paint a mural on the side of her mom’s bakery. Her mom agreed, and Lancaster spent around 75 hours painting a scene that would now take her four hours to complete.
“When you’re in your 20s, you have this weird confidence, so I said ‘this is what I do for a living now,’” said the artist, who got her first job soon after that from posting an ad on Kijiji.
That job was painting scenes and backdrops for Celebrations Dinner Theatre, and she could carry out work for them in the downtime her event coordination job offered. Once the pandemic hit and Lancaster became unemployed, she got more into painting, teaching herself new skills and techniques as she went along.
Along the way, Lancaster had started posting her work on Facebook, Instagram, and once it became more popular, TikTok. Not being able to do either of her jobs during COVID-19, and finding out she was pregnant at that time, she took it as a sign to paint murals full-time, and her large audience on social media helped her to do so.
Lancaster said every mural she’s painted is different, custom in some way to the client, but each falls into one of her three categories:
– Florals and greenery — Lancaster often uses this style as a décor-friendly solution wallpaper.
– Scenic — Lancaster often paints scenes in nurseries or children’s bedrooms.
– Pop art — This is Lancaster’s newest and favourite style to paint in, and it’s what she used to paint on the side of The Vault Cannabis Ashern.
The Vault Cannabis has three locations in Manitoba — one in Ashern, Arborg, and Sainte Rose du Lac — and Lancaster has painted on the inside and outside of each one. On the interior walls of The Vault, people will find fun, graphic novel-style paintings of different kinds of people smoking weed in various ways. Her favourite thing to paint is older people smoking weed, and in each mural Lancaster paints, she includes a teddy bear in some way — possibly smoking weed as well.
In Canada, exterior-facing walls can’t display cannabis, so Lancaster had to create something to paint outside The Vault. She found a way to ensure each outside mural included a nod to the town, like the Golden Boy smoking weed on a shop in Winnipeg.
“On the drive up, all I smelled was cows,” said Lancaster. “So, I painted a cow and a chicken on the mural. I got so many compliments on them.”
Over a vibrant pink, orange, blue, purple, and yellow background, Lancaster surrounded the farm animals with donuts, flowers, a profile of a woman wearing sunglasses, a duck in a fur coat, and more. Showing the piece as it progressed on her social media accounts, the video got more than 24,000 views on Instagram, almost 62,000 on TikTok, and nearly 19,000 on Facebook.
One Instagram user commented, ‘That will bring a lot of smiles and photos’, while another commented, ‘Just saw your mural in Ashern yesterday…amazing.’ On TikTok, a user commented they see the mural all the time and love Lancaster’s work, and another commented Ashern is her hometown and gave app users a fun fact — The Vault Cannabis is in the old bank building.
Lancaster likes that her videos garner attention for her work and the towns she works in. She’s hoping her mural in Ashern sparks a pitstop on some road trips this summer.
