The hallways of CHS are anything but boring. They’re covered with murals: vegetable gardens and night elves on the first floor, dragons and the Cat in the Hat on the second and the Beatles and Carol on the third. The stairwells are decorated withracehorses and portraits of Oscar Wilde. Even outside Community, students have spread their artwork, resulting in the mural on the fence of the back lawn and another around the back of Zingerman’s.
And there’s about to be one more. For weeks, Susan LaMoreaux, part-time CHS junior, has been laboring to create her own mural, a giant rainbow zebra surrounded by peace signs, hearts, and various other shapes and symbols, on the wall of the CR office.
“Since eighth grade I’ve wanted to do a mural,” said LaMoreaux, explaining how this unique project came to be. “I decided I might as well do a CR and get some art credit and do a mural, because I wanted to do that.”
LaMoreaux was originally intending to paint her mural in the stairwell between the first and second floor, but she soon discovered that the stairs would make it difficult
for her to reach most parts of the wall.
She acquired her current mural space when she went to register for her CR. “I showed [my design] to the people in the CR office,” LaMoreaux recalled, “They were like, ‘Wait a minute, we have this completely empty wall right here!’ so I ended up doing it in there.”
LaMoreaux brainstormed for days with her CR monitor, local artist Barbara Cervenka, trying to come up with a design for her mural. “I did like eight random sketches,” she said. “I played around with a lot of zebra ideas, and I combined two of them to end up with my current design.”
To begin her mural, LaMoreaux first made a transparency of her original design and projected it onto the wall for tracing purposes. However, she soon discovered the difficulties of overhead projectors. “Every time I would stop and come back I had to move the projector back into position, and it was off a little bit, so it’s not exactly the same as my design,” said LaMoreaux. “There’s a different number of stripes now.”
LaMoreaux then marked out the colors of each part of the design and began painting. She’s using acrylic paint, which is water-based and dries quickly, so she doesn’t have to worry about wet paint smearing or dripping.
It’s easy for her to access, too. “Elena has acrylic,” LaMoreaux said. “There’s lots of tubes and bottles of things down in the art room, so I just run down and grab some paint.”
LaMoreaux isn’t sure when her mural will be done, but she’s quickly making progress on it. She invites anyone to visit the CR office and see her work.
“I hope you like it,” she said.
