by Ellen Elmes
from Inquiry, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2002, 64-77
© Copyright 2002 Virginia Community College System
Abstract
An art instructor narrates the genesis, creation, and effects of two
community murals.
This story is rooted in my inability to stay on course for a lengthy period of time. As both an educator and artist, the winds of new possibilities are frequently blowing me about as was the case with my experience of painting history murals for towns and institutions sporadically over the last twenty years. As an educator, I am prone to asking theoretical questions, such as “What if, instead of painting these murals all by myself, I were to engage a whole group of inexperienced students and community people in painting their own mural?” As an artist and Pisces dreamer, I am not prone to looking reality in the face and noticing an aghast expression having something to do with logistics and time management.
Therefore, the question soon became earthbound, and, as my mind starting digging into the premise for such an endeavor, I was brought, as I usually am, to the historical perspective. Mural making enjoys the highest accolades as being a vehicle of social and political expression. “The highest, the most logical, the purest and strongest form of painting is the mural…It is for the people. It is for all.” These powerful words were spoken by Jose Clemente Orozco who, along with Diego Rivera and David Siqueros, wielded his political activism through the power of the brush rather than the sword, expressing the ideology of the Mexican revolution in huge nationalistic murals. From the prehistoric cave paintings to the Sistine Chapel to New Deal post office art to Chicago’s 1960’s Wall of Respect to the mile-long Great Wall of Los Angeles, mural painters have continued to pass the torch of using art to express common culture and passion. As Bertolt Brecht said, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
My dig for substance hit rock, however, when questions began to surface concerning the seemingly non-revolutionary, non-confrontational climate of my serene Southwest Virginia Community College environment. What were the issues of our students? Was there a commonality of experience amongst modern-day residents of our Appalachian towns? Were my young students champing at the bit to speak out? Well, I knew the answer to that one…NO! And therein lay the substance of my potential endeavor. Why were they not?
One of my major challenges as an educator in a rural, relatively isolated community college has been to enhance my students’ sense of self-respect and self-worth. Coming from a heritage where the exquisitely syncopated designs of quilts have been valued more for the warmth they contain than the artistry they exhibit, my art students who were born and raised in the mountains often receive little encouragement to dream the big picture. In their minds, the opportunity for fame and fortune in the art world lies solely in the hands of New York and Los Angeles youth. Or, bringing the scope within state boundaries, it is believed by many of our learners that artist “wannabees” can only realize their dreams if they are from northern Virginia. This perspective is further chiseled into the minds of our high school youth when they are given the wonderful opportunity to participate in a session of the Governor’s School for the Arts. They enjoy an incredible period of learning and creative growth but in the end come away quietly embarrassed by their lack of previous experience with printmaking processes or film editing or lost-wax casting. Of course, this discrepancy of creative knowledge stems simply from the fact of our coal mining, small farming communities riding out the unemployment wave of the last ten years on a surfboard of practicality and need-based educational goals. It is not anybody’s fault; it is everybody’s fact.
Of course, good teaching and steadfast learning do not sprout solely in fact but in vision as well. Our ratio of creatively gifted and talented students in our overall population is not diminished by economic conditions, and, certainly, I reasoned, a large percentage of these students go unnoticed by virtue of the still looming drive for achievement in not only the “3 R’s,” but science and technology as well, traditionally champions of left-mode thinking. How could I empower my “right-brainers,” many of them dyslexic learners and emerging artists, to show themselves and our communities the strength of their creative vision? What about the younger ones whose minds were not yet made up on their chances of winging to creative victory? And what of the older ones who never had the chance to see?
In the end, the “Miracle Grow” of my wishful thinking turned out to be three factors rooted in vision: the VCCS Chancellor’s Professorship grant opportunity, a local Main Street revitalization Teen Center project, and the mayor of Clintwood, Virginia. A colleague at SWCC at the time and former recipient of the Chancellor’s Professorship, Don Bartholomay, first encouraged me by convincing me that projects awarded the Professorship grant spanned a wide realm of endeavor and that anything was possible. “Why not apply?” he said.
The mastermind of the local Teen Center project, Glenn Harrison, in unbeknownst-to-him harmony with my vision, soon called on me to coordinate future involvement of my SWCC art students as mentors to participating youth and as painters of murals in the decoration of the Teen Center. With my grant application in the mail to the VCCS and the Teen Center proposal submitted to the Richlands Town Council, I received a call from the Mayor of Clintwood, Virginia, Donald Baker, one day. “You are the hardest person to find!” he said with exasperation. “Ever since I saw your mural in Kingsport, Tennessee, almost a year ago, I have been trying to get you over here to paint a mural for us in Clintwood!” Of course, I had to decline doing a mural myself but quickly suggested to him that I might have some very talented students that I could supervise to paint it for him. There must have been some alignment of the planets or “Your Time Has Come, Right-Brainers” celebration that summer because it all came together! I did get the Chancellor’s Professorship Award, the Teen Center was approved by the Town Council (although the schedule for the reconstruction of the proposed building was delayed for a year), and Mayor Baker did come up with funds and commitment for a mural project in Clintwood.
The only remaining questions were “How was I going to pull this off?” (two murals now instead of one!) and “Who would be willing to participate?” My opportune position as a community college instructor soon solved the problem of the “who” as I began preparation for a new spring 2001 art class in mural painting and design. I offered the class as both Introduction to Painting (ART 125) and Topics in Mural Painting (ART 195) in hopes of pulling in the broadest spectrum of participants. I also offered the class on Monday nights on-campus in the Richlands area location and on Tuesday nights off-campus (one hour and a half away) in the Dickenson County Haysi/Clintwood area. I distributed brochures about the classes, visited high school art classes to talk with prospective art students, and publicized through local newspapers the opportunity for “any interested individuals” to participate, whether experienced in art or not, whether 16 or 65 years of age. After all, mural making is founded in equality and opportunity for all! (Later that summer, during a relatively few frustrating moments on the wall, this would come back to haunt me!)
I must pause here in my attempt to tell a somewhat chronological story of the making of two community murals to describe the mural-makers who were both the fertile soil and the tillers of the soil for our eventually burgeoning projects. These students, in fact, became the answers to “how was I going to pull this off?” because they turned “I” into “we.”
They were two distinct groups of people. The Richlands on-campus class was composed primarily of young people who generally did not know each other at the beginning of the course. The class included three high school students, one middle school student and his mother (in her mid-fifties), six full-time SWCC students (late teens and early twenties in age), and two part-time SWCC students (upper twenties and late forties in age). They were understandably apprehensive at first, not knowing what to expect, with the younger ones seemingly wary of each other’s unknown artistic competitive potential. Later in the course, one of my many satisfactions came from seeing competition for personal glory dissolve into purposeful team effort towards shared accomplishment.
The Dickenson County class, held at Haysi High School, had a very different group dynamic. They all seemed to know each other right from the beginning, which I later discovered was due to family and school relationships. Five high school teachers (in their thirties and forties), five high school students, two middle school students, three full-time SWCC students (two in their twenties and one in her thirties), and two part-time SWCC students (middle-aged) were the participants in this class. Of those seventeen people, two were sister and brother, two were mother and daughter, two were cousins, and four taught in the same school. Later on in the painting of the mural, a mother joined the sister and brother, a woman joined her sister, and a seventy-year-old joined his neighbor in the endeavor. Needless to say, this group did not suffer from shyness, and I was often lucky to get a word in edgewise. But what enthusiasm they brought to the project!
I navigated the course by anchoring it in mural painting history, just as I had turned to my mentors of mural painting when I first endeavored to paint one myself and when I first conceived of the project. We did this on several levels, beginning with viewing and discussing a Power Point presentation I had prepared highlighting various community wall paintings and painters from prehistoric times up to the present day. It was exciting to realize the brainstorming potential generated by seeing such varied techniques and perspectives of artists from different time periods and cultures. Both classes spent two whole evening class periods responding to what they had seen.
Further and more experiential components of the early part of the class were two field trips on weekends to actual mural sites. Our first trip was local, beginning in Abingdon, Virginia, on the Virginia Highlands Community College campus to see the work of D. R. Mullins, who graciously gave us a couple of hours to talk about his work on site. We then went over the border to North Carolina to see the work of fresco painter Ben Long. His extraordinary traditional fresco techniques were applied to spiritual murals in two small churches in the West Jefferson area of western North Carolina. We ended our day trip by going into downtown West Jefferson to view three completed outdoor murals by three different painters, exciting projects initiated and funded by the Ashe County Arts Council.
Our second trip involved an entire wonderfully exhausting weekend beginning on a Friday afternoon at the University of Virginia’s Cabell Hall. Here, our gracious guide, pathology professor Dr. Donald J. Innes, Chair of the Cabell Hall Centennial Mural Project, gave us a thorough introduction and viewing of the magnificent mural, titled The Student’s Progress, by Lincoln Perry. We were also given a peek at the reproduction of The School of Athens that resides on the other side of the Perry mural wall in the auditorium, a rare treat that directly influenced the eventual design of the Dickenson County mural.
We traveled on to Washington, D.C., the following day, seeing labor murals in the lobbies of the AFL-CIO Building and the International Union of North America Building, ceiling paintings and Trumball extravaganzas in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building, and, of course, art at its cumulatively most-inspiring in the National Gallery of Art. Sunday, we traveled back into Virginia on the eastern shore where we enjoyed Wyland’s Whaling Wall and the experience of “swimming” in the rain among the mermaids in Norfolk’s colorful Waterfront area.
Our grand finale was the viewing of John Biggers’ Hampton University Library murals, which was a breathtaking experience for all of us. Two very knowledgeable and enthusiastic research librarians, Naomi Rhodes and Frank Etchcum, gave up a few hours of their spring break to give us a thorough tour and talk concerning the Biggers murals.
One of my students, a teacher named Donna Leftwich, later wrote, “The Biggers’ mural is a study in ‘secrets’; secrets from one generation to another....The mural appeal lies in its ability to never be outdated. It is an art form that future generations will identify with, the many intricate themes about humans, and history, survival and prosperity, and the lessons that patience, faith and strength and the bonds of family provide. And, like all art, the mysteries are there. The nesting, nurturing, extended family have provided for the young. They will continue to be communities.”
Mr. Etchcum later found us a way into Clark Hall where a greatly revered original mural by Charles White was painted in 1943. We parted from our guides at the Emancipation Oak on the Hampton University campus, a grand expansive old tree at the site of which the African Americans of the area gathered to celebrate the proclamation of the Emancipation Act following the Civil War. A more inspiring engagement with community history could not have been experienced by our group!
Needless to say, the dynamics of traveling for days in a group broke down any remaining barriers we may have felt in either of the classes in regard to working as a team. The learning process in the classroom became an entity that took on a life of its own, discovering, developing, stalling, forging, changing, and finally, culminating in solid ideas. I initiated the brainstorming process in the same manner that I began thinking about the whole idea—with questions. I wanted the students to start from a broad-based creative field. The Richlands group had no beginning criteria for their mural theme, other than possibly the generational link that they shared; the Haysi class, however, did have the broad stipulation from the mayor that their mural should touch on Dickenson County’s history and culture.
I asked students to write down, between the first class meeting and the next, responses to questions including: What do you have in common with people of your generation or community? What is unique about you? What is unique about where you live…about your culture and/or history…about your values and/or beliefs? What are your goals and dreams? What are the problems of your community or generation? If you could effect change or influence on your community or peers, what would you focus upon? What are you most proud of about your community or generation? What are you most ashamed of?
This process resulted in three consecutive class meetings enveloped in dialogue concerning individual and group issues born of the responses to the questions. From week to week, I would record on flip-chart paper as many of their responses as possible, and at the beginning of the next class we would review what was said, siphon out the less important ideas, leaving focal themes for further discussion. It was really a process of collecting an abundance of ideas (all things are possible at first), and sorting, processing, adding, eliminating, and eventually fine-tuning what we really were about. It has been my brainstorming process for every mural I have designed, so I was heartened in the early stages of this new endeavor to find that it was working as a group dynamic!
Each class, of course, took its own direction in thematic thinking. The Richlands class expressed their passions and frustrations along the lines of their respective ages. Several of the younger students were clear on their desire to break loose, upon graduation, from their rural, “b-o-o-r-r-r-i-n-g” environment of southwest Virginia to the big city. Their perspective was countered by an older group of students who said they had “been there, done that,” and found themselves migrating back to the mountains and the memories of the homeplace. A pair of twenty-year-olds found common ground in their discussion of the expectations put upon people of their age in terms of success, fame, and fortune, and of the competitive landscape in technological fields.
“With all the advances in technology, it is easy to feel overwhelmed or left behind,” said Seth West, a 24-year-old. “Growing older today is an experience full of challenges, and in order to be successful, you must change with the times and adapt to our fast-paced world.”
Our youngest class member teamed up with a twenty-year-old who excels in fantasy illustration and still values his memories and dreams of childhood associated with imaginary play. A single mother in the class, who has raised five children, stressed the important characteristic of fortitude possessed by many women in our area in the face of hardship.
One of the most memorable dialogues in my mind that emerged one night was concerned with the contemporary issue of displaying the Confederate flag on public property. This focus of discussion was preceded by increasingly patriotic comments made by a few participants, and in defense of the display of the Confederate flag, one white student attempted to conclude the discussion by saying, “After all, we are citizens of the South, and it should be our right to display our pride in our heritage.” A charismatic black student who had been unusually quiet during most of the discussion responded calmly but purposefully, “I too am a citizen of the South, as you put it, and I have, since childhood, been taught to fear and loathe all that the Confederate flag symbolizes for a black person. That is my heritage.” There it was; my students were teaching themselves the incredible power of symbolism to divide or unify the public conscience! Lesson One—how vitally important for muralists to carefully choose their visual symbols in respect of the receiving community.
The Haysi class, in the meantime, was also responding enthusiastically to the same set of questions, leading them to entirely different arenas of discussion. They began exploring the many years of stereotyping that our mountainous culture has suffered through the media, movies, and books. They felt strongly that they did not want to stereotype themselves in this mural, but at the same time they didn’t want to paint an exaggerated rosy picture of Dickenson County. They wanted to address whatever problems arose.
As a New Jersey native, I learned a tremendous amount from this class. I watched seventeen-year-old Dusti Turner speak with passion about 1989 when her mom and aunts sat down in the road to halt scab coal truck drivers during the much-publicized UMWA strike that year. I listened to Arthur Marshall tell with pride of his Melungeon heritage and the mysteries connected with how these ancestors of supposedly African-Turkish origin came to settle in our area of the Appalachians. I heard Marsha Conaway declare that she was the only grandchild out of twenty to go to college. I enjoyed Matthew Counts’ enthusiasm concerning his work with his father in the Breaks Interstate Park of Dickenson County and his description of how the special beauty of the place made him grateful to live where he does.
Sunday dinner-on-the-ground, baptisms in the river, bluegrass music, recreational opportunities, trust in neighbors, and unity of the community during conflict emerged as proud and celebrated themes. In contrast, severe loss of community property during major floods, destruction of the land from excessive logging, displacement of families due to dam building, and loss of life in the mines were all acknowledged sources of sorrow and anger among county residents. Once again, the students were teaching themselves another aspect of birthing a mural! Lesson Two—gather, assimilate, and acknowledge the collective experience…it binds us together by intangible, incredible means.
In our group dig for mural resources, we reached the next layer of hard rock when the time came, finally, to turn the intangible into the tangible. What images could be wrought to represent the many gems of truth that we had uncovered? I realized it was my time to try to provide the next phase of guidance and direction. The sketchbooks were brought out, disposable cameras distributed, and assignments given. Haysi students were asked to draw treasured objects from home and family, to take pictures around the county of special sites, and to delve into family albums, newspaper clippings, and historical books about the county.
The Richlands students were given yin-yang symbols and asked to draw, in each half, images of opposing forces of the growing-up experience. They teamed up, two to three people per group, under the umbrella of related interests and began group doodling on large sheets of paper. They took pictures of each other in positions of breaking away, holding up a young child, calling a little kid home. Our youngest participant, Cory Griffith, brought in Star Wars models for his older partner to draw, and his mother began making paper patterns for a double wedding ring quilt design.
About halfway through the semester we arrived at what to me is both the most challenging and most exciting part of the mural making process—composing the design. This is truly the birthing experience—equally painful and exuberant!
As I came to feel more and more an equal member of these birthing teams, I began to consider what would be my best contribution towards a successful final result. Realizing, after several weeks into the course, that the Richlands group was composed of primarily independent-minded individuals, most of whom could draw well, I decided to present them with a composition of empty shapes, proposing that they work either individually or with a partner to fill the shapes with images expressing their chosen parts of the overall theme. Early in the class discussions, my mind kept lingering on an image of an hourglass as a possible symbol for the “coming of age” theme that was emerging. Therefore, my proposed composition featured five large hourglass shapes spanning, in alternating high and low positions, the width of the mural design. Linked between every two hourglasses, and placed directly across the middle, were four large circular shapes to allow for symbols representing the four primary ethnic heritages that our class had determined were currently most common among our regional student population.
Fortunately for me, the shape design was enthusiastically accepted by the group. The ensuing weeks, although slippery with struggle and sweat, culminated in a wonderful student-powered expression of who they were, are, and hope to be. The first hourglass celebrates play and imagination for both the young child and the adult. As its creator, Thomas Hagerman, says, “No matter what age we are, we still like to play.” The next hourglass features the hardworking student breaking the chains of school, childhood, and rural living and spanning out of the hourglass to head for the great metropolis. Its designer, Beverly Carty, commented, “But no matter where you go, you always have the values you learned from grade school through high school. The book in the mural represents this.”
The middle hourglass sits on an expanded base as well as concept. The top of the hourglass depicts mountains transforming into sands that wisp through the neck of the hourglass onto the roof of the homeplace. Two women representing motherhood, one dressed as a homemaker and the other a business woman, were created by Kayla Rasnake as women determinedly holding up the homeplace (an inspiration from the John Biggers’ mural). Below the hourglass, a young male and female, standing against a quilt backdrop of their mountain heritage, hold keys and step up onto a stairway leading away to their unknown future. Ethel Walden, who created the quilt image, remarked, “The double wedding ring pattern is symbolic of some things in life, such as love, that are never ending and rooted in the road back home.”
The fourth hourglass addresses the issue of the young adult in today’s competitive world. Brandon Viney designed an Atlas-like figure crouched in the lower half, holding the weight of a computer and the technological world. The upper part, by Seth West, transforms the burdened young person into an exuberant adult who has found his own way in life by recognizing personal strengths and preferences. The variety of personalities in the world is represented by the zodiac above the hourglass.
The last hourglass celebrates not only the coming of age of the young couple holding their new baby (and a new generation) to the sun, but it celebrates the revitalization of the town of Richlands as well. This was a concept suggested to us by the Director of the Richlands Area Chamber of Commerce, Ginger Branton, when she heard about the odyssey of the young people in our theme. Anne Noel Walker, a partner in the designing and painting of this hourglass, explained further the concept, “This final hourglass is about birth and rebirth—of a baby and a town. The new generation can now look forward to national, global, and spiritual connections whether they decide to leave southwest Virginia or to remain in the area—the World Wide Web and other forms of advanced communications now give us easy access to foreign realms as well as other cultures of the USA.”
The circle shapes became vibrant symbols of heritage in the hands of Seth and Cory (a Native American Dream-catcher), Jacenta Trigg (an original African mandela), Anne (a Hindu Shiva) and Josh Robinson (a Celtic knot). The biggest surprise and grand finale of the overall design, however, was a solution by the students for the problem of having to utilize a one-story wall space that was way too long for our rectangular mural design. The idea of painting a life-sized, full-figure portrait of each person painting the mural directly on the empty brick wall on either side of the mural emerged from the depths of collective creativity. Each student would paint themselves carrying brushes, paint buckets and rollers as they walked towards the mural to begin their daily work, a brilliant solution.
The process and successful outcome of the Dickenson County mural took a different route entirely, being designed by different people. One team member, Mavis Arrington, was from the beginning prone to expressing her ideas through drawings, thereby helping us to visualize our concepts in the early stages of the process. Additionally, a teacher in the group, Robin Charles, who is also an artist, applied an assigned exercise of looking at masterworks of art for compositional ideas to Raphael’s School of Athens. The broad arch that spans across this painting generated Robin’s idea of utilizing three arches in our design. This quickly led to the idea of making the arches into a railroad trestle with a train billowing steam across the top of the mural. From there, the triangular top trestle structure became containers for historical buildings and sites in the county, and the open arches within were perfect enclosures for three primary foci of the mural—conflict, community and culture. Voila!
However, there were still many good ideas afloat in the classroom, and it wasn’t until three visiting professors from Lipetsk, Russia, came with me one Tuesday night to experience our energized Haysi endeavor that clarity really dawned. They asked the simple questions, “What is your main focus; what are you really trying to say?” Once again, as an imaginary crowd cheered in my brain, I realized that the dynamics of dialogue can lead to self-teaching! Lesson Three—establish a clear message that is expressed throughout the mural as a whole.
The response to the Russian inquiries was as much a surprise to me as it may have been to our visitors. “The natural beauty of where we live…the beauty of life, work, and spirituality” (to paraphrase a group response) was what my happy ears heard that night. From the vantage point of currently having the privilege of viewing our completed mural in downtown Clintwood, I have no doubt that our designers and painters have given clear voice to their collective hearts and minds. A finishing compositional touch emerged in response to that evening’s definition of vision. To the left and right sides of the mural design were added borders composed of an extensive variety of wild plants and trees native to Dickenson County and the southern Appalachians.
The finalizing of both mural designs brought a long-awaited opportunity for celebration. Invitations to “Mural Design Presentations” were sent out to family, friends, and community members at the end of the semester. The course was concluded with exercises in mural painting techniques, and at Haysi, I was given my final assignment by my students. Since they had supplied all the imagery and composition for their mural in sketches and photographs, I was to do my part by drawing out the overall working design. “After all,” they said, “we will have to work from one particular drawing style in order to paint a mural that looks cohesive.” At two and three o’clock in the morning on several consecutive nights, I remembered why I had at first been apprehensive of having so many public school teachers in that class!
The community response to the mural designs was gratifying for all of us. People chatted about the designs with excitement, homemade food was served, grandparents and babies hobbled about, and one of the Haysi students, Tim O’Quinn, arranged for his dad, grandfather, and uncle to play live bluegrass music for the Dickenson County occasion. (Both dad and grandfather ended up being portrayed in the final mural painting.) Both projects were written up extensively in the local papers, and a Town Council member from Clintwood proposed having a big downtown bash when the mural was completed. What faith they had in our inexperienced painters!
Throughout this article, I have utilized the five stages of creativity developed by American psychologist Jacob Getzel as my heading titles because of the creative, intuitive nature of this whole mural endeavor (Edwards). Now I come to “verification”—that scary time when the jury is in. Once again questions filled my mind, but this time it was primarily one big question: Can we do this?
In my energetic attempts to be democratic throughout the project, I had essentially invited everyone in each town to come try their hand at mural painting! Would there be enough flat color spaces for the people who had no painting skills? Would I be able to teach the ones who wanted to paint complicated images how to do it in one easy lesson? Would I have to come back at night with a flashlight and fix things?
The students in my spring classes had, of course, first option to paint for up to one hundred hours and to be paid a small stipend per hour. They had to sign agreements to verify their commitment to this summer endeavor. The town maintenance people in both Richlands and Clintwood cleverly erected the scaffolding at each site although there was a drastic difference in height between the two murals. One level of scaffolding brought us to the top of the Richlands mural as opposed to three levels (with the right end tiers being hand-built out of wood) to the top in Clintwood. Some potential painters dropped out on the first day in Clintwood when they saw the height of the scaffolding!
I found myself initially spending Mondays and Tuesdays at the Richlands site and Thursdays and Fridays with the painters in Clintwood. About halfway through the summer, my time in Richlands stretched through Wednesdays, and Clintwood painting days morphed into Saturdays. At first, before the public schools let out, we had a bare bones crew to prepare the walls with sealer and gesso underpainting. My husband Don and I struck red chalk lines at each mural site to supply gridlines for the drawing of each design from sketch to wall. For some of the students, this became a challenging process of applying little used mathematical and measuring skills.
Haysi spring class students Regina Wallace and her brother G. J. Conley became from the start faithful apprentices and developed into skillful painters with Regina’s pride and joy becoming the wild plants and G. J.’s the steam train. Later, their mother, Carolina Conley, joined us and perfected her historical building painting techniques. Another regular from the original class was Scarlett Counts, who applied her skills to beautifully painting a graceful female statue from the local cemetery who represented a family of scholars and philanthropists in the town of Clintwood. A seasoned painter, Mavis Arrington, eventually painted most of the left arch, which included a portrait of her son kayaking down the Russell Fork whitewaters. Our youngest regular painter, Candace Miller, showed up every day at 8:00 a.m. sharp and proved to be a very gifted young artist. The teachers, Robin Charles, Rita Justice, Kevin Minion, Arthur Marshall and Donna Leftwich all faithfully volunteered time on the wall on many Saturdays when they could squeeze space into their busy schedules. Mother and daughter, Barbara and Samantha Newberry, continued their spring class involvement by contributing time on the wall and were joined by volunteers from the town of Clintwood, Bill Wallace and Susan Blansett who created colorful painted imagery in the middle arch. Even my husband was dragged into the painting process during August, as deadlines were looming, and he revealed amazing painting skills that during our thirty-two years of marriage, I never knew he possessed!
At the Richlands site, most of my spring class students took up where they had left off by painting the imagery they had designed. We received an added boost of help on this mural from a former part-time student at SWCC. Robyn Raines had been awarded a leadership project grant from the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia that enabled her to engage in a community project of her choice to further enhance her leadership skills. She chose us and added a great deal of practical, hands-on help towards the completion of our project.
And complete it, we did! Both in Richlands and Clintwood, we developed over the course of the summer, great tans, stronger arm muscles, a collective sense of humor, advanced painting skills, humility in the face of our task, everlasting bonds of friendship, and finally, great pride in ourselves and our work! Our murals have been shown on television, written up in newspapers, and recently the Clintwood mural was chosen for the cover of the regional tourism brochure. This spring we will have two community dedication ceremonies for the murals, and both groups will travel to Philadelphia to meet artists from their Mural Arts Project, as well as tour some of the hundreds of community murals painted in the city over the last twenty years. Many of the mural painters are currently involved in course-generated service learning projects, an aspect of the second phase of my Chancellor’s Professorship grant, providing after-school art workshops to elementary school children in our service area. Several of the muralists have already received commissions for small mural projects in churches and private homes.
My last question to myself—was the project successful? Lesson Four in Community Mural Making was taught to me by one of my students in a letter he wrote to me one day. I think this young man’s statement eloquently answers my question:
“This class has made me realize a lot of things from different points of view. Like how many different talents that I have and how to better myself by using these talents. It’s the simple things in life that I have taken for granted, but now I realize how art can be so emotional. I have seen how to put my emotions in pictures.”
—G.J. Conley
Works Cited
Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Artist Within. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Ellen Elmes is an art instructor and gallery director at Southwest Virginia Community College and a professional painter. Ellen has painted historic murals in Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania since 1980.