IF YOU MAKE your way towards King John’s Castle in Limerick, you will come face to face with a startling painting of a bearded man eyeing up a particularly terrifying ice cream.
And what’s that on his neck? Just a Hello Kitty tattoo.
The mural was painted by Smug, an internationally renowned street artist based in Glasgow, and has been in Limerick since 2013.
The piece was commissioned by Limerick City Council as part of the Make A Move festival and can be seen on the side of the Wild Ireland store.
The mural was one of several commissioned to coincide with the redevelopment of the area around King John’s Castle. Not everyone was happy with it when it first appeared. In 2013, The Limerick Post quoted a local resident as saying, “If that’s modern art, then I’m Picasso.”
Then Labour councillor Tom Shortt defended the murals as being of a “high standard” and preferable to “the embarrassingly poor quality bronze public sculptures” dotted around the city.
Nearly five years later and the hyper realistic mural remains one of the most striking pieces of street art in the city.
I scream, you scream, we all scream for… eyeball-adorned ice cream.
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