Sometimes to get a great idea, all you need is a big, white wall.
And for art teacher Linda Robinson, that wall of inspiration is found surrounding the construction being done on Oxford Middle School’s kiva and cafeteria.
“When I walked in at the beginning of the year and saw the big white wall there because of the construction – it was just begging to be painted,” explained Robinson.
Robinson decided to turn the “ready-made” canvas into a mural of memories for this year’s eighth grade art classes. She quickly threw together a lesson plan that centered around creating image that would depict the diversity of the class through contoured drawings of the students.
The result is a dark blue shadow-painting of 49 life-size youths standing in the main hallway of the school.
“I just thought ‘This would be cool. This is what the hallway actually looks like when the kids are in it,’” said Robinson.
She continued to explain that the concept behind the mural actually came from a middle school art teacher who had been named Teacher of the Year by the National Art Education Association.
“She had done something similar,” said Robinson, “but on a smaller scale with groups of two or three students.”
The Oxford Middle School mural involved every eighth grade art student in one way or another. Robinson said she took volunteers for those who would pose and those who would draw. The different models stood on boxes and an overhead projector was used to create a shadow on the wall behind them. Classmates then traced the images and everyone helped to fill in the color with dark blue latex paint.
“It’s a cohesive group of kids,” said Robinson. “It was originally suppose to be black, but we ended up with the dark blue, which is fine because it’s all throughout the school and having that color seemed to bring more unity and make a powerful statement.”
With three class periods working each day, the entire project to date has taken two days for tracing and a week for painting.
“I just think it’s wonderful the way the kids did this,” said Robinson. “They were quite sophisticated in the way that they posed.”
The wall represents all kinds of students at Oxford Middle School: band kids, athletes, friends, those handicapped, minorities, solitary figures and artists. The images also depict the character and interests of the many youths from music and sports to books and television.
“It’s not so much about who posed for those images, but about who that wall represents up there and the diversity in this school,” explained Robinson.
“The students really got involved in this. I hear kids talking about it all the time. This was a real learning experience for all of them.”
In fact, Robinson said she had one student feel so strongly about not having the mural be all one color, that the youth wrote her an extensive letter about why the images should contain every detail of the individual.
“I was impressed at her strength to voice her opinion,” added Robinson. “She really felt strongly about this having detail.”
Robinson said the next step for the mural will be cleaning up the images, which includes removing any drips and smoothing out any edges. Also, poetry written by Mark Ott’s eighth grade English classes will be added above the shadow students.
The poems are based on the theme “Our School” and range in topics from what the students like about the school, to what they don’t like, to simply what’s happening in the building.
“When I presented this assignment to them I said ‘Look, we have an opportunity here to put some graffiti up,’” said a laughing Ott. “I thought, ‘We have this great wall here, let’s mess with it!’”
The eighth grade English teacher decided to move up his lessons on poetry in order to provide the text for the mural. He structured his lesson around showing the students the functionality of the art form.
“I wanted them to know that poetry is a compact form of expression they can say so much in,” explained Ott. “Hopefully, the poetry will become an on-going thing. I’ve already been getting more turned in since we finished.”
Robinson said she plans to put the poetry in large, bright, multi-colored bubbles above the shadow-students’ heads; however, she isn’t sure she wants text bubbles.
“I don’t want students to feel insecure if a bubble is put by their shadow and that’s not really something they would say,” she explained.
So what will happen to the wall once construction is finished? Robinson just wasn’t sure.
“We’ll enjoy it this year,” she stated. “Sometimes art is temporary, but hopefully this will not be a temporary memory for the students.”