Inside teacher Jill Deimler’s art studio at Greenwood High School, the pottery wheels do not spin, sitting idle in a corner, despite it being time for the Pottery 2 class.
Instead, students buzz about mixing new paint colors and retrieving brushes. They meticulously stroke the brushes down a canvas to fill in highlights, add definition with black lines, and right a wrongly painted color.
For some students, this isn’t their first art-love.
“I’m not normally a fan of painting, but this is fun,” said student Emily Herr.
She was repainting a section of the soon-to-be hallway mural with a peach color to contrast against an orange nearby. She really enjoyed painting the drama masks in the mural and was having a lot of fun working with her classmates to put the finishing touches on the mural.
Greenwood’s middle and high school students had been painting the two murals over eight days with the direction and help of muralist Katie Trainer. She is the artist in residence with the Perry County Council of the Arts.
The project started two weeks ago with the students drawing pencil sketches of items representing the various art and technical classes at the school. One mural represents the arts from painting and drawing to music and theater (along with the obligatory Wildcat mascot). The second mural is the technical arts including a welder at the center, quilt squares representing textiles and fashion, food and cooking, and other such imagery.
The first will go upstairs in the hallway at the top of the stairs. The technical mural will go downstairs in the hallway leading to the shops and studios. Once installed, the technical mural’s welder will appear to be working on the real metal railing. Trainer planned to begin installations late last week and into this.
The kids in the classes were really enthusiastic about the project.
Herr said at the beginning she and the other students had so many different ideas, but the more they talked with each other, they came up with a good plan for the murals.
“We have students mixing colors, and they’re talking to each other and working together,” Deimler said. “It’s excellent.”
For some students, the work on the murals was cathartic, a release from everyday stresses. They could zone out a bit and fall into the painting.
“It really helps me when I’m having a rough day,” said Kaylee Foust. “It calms me.”
At the other table, students Emily Hixson, Summer Swartz and Sarah Miller were working on another set of panels. Hixson dipped the paint brush into some paint and made slight touches to the canvas, adding some white to black stitching. It gave the painting depth, as if the quilt threads could be pulled from the wall.
“I think it was fun at the beginning deciding what colors we were going to use,” Hixson said.
Next to her, Swartz is helping in the details, giving the quilt definition. She likes the expressionism inherent in the project.
“I like the freedom,” she said.
Miller, too, felt freedom in the broad brushstrokes, but noted it’s not as simple as slapping paint on canvas.
“I had an idea of what color goes where, but as you add more, it becomes difficult,” she said.
In the second class of the day (Drawing and Painting 2), students continue the work of their classmates, adding dimension, shadow and detail to the project.
Dylan Dennis was by himself on the one canvas working at a dark panel with a fairly detailed moon and starry sky. The moon’s surface looks like it might be just as dusty as the video of Neil Armstrong walking on its surface.
“I saw the panel that was dark blue, and I immediately thought of space,” Dennis said, noting that inspired him to paint in the moon and stars.
He just came back from a trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the home of NASA’s launch operations.
The murals are the latest that Greenwood students have done with a couple artists in recent years. Some of the murals reside in their school, while other reside in the community, including a mural on the side of Millerstown Firehouse and one on the side of the Liverpool Post Office.
Jim T. Ryan can be reached via email at jtryan@perrycountytimes.com
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