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PAINTING the TOWN
Lowellville art students pool talent to do mural
By Denise Dick
lowellville
Lowellville High School students took a step back in time, painting a mural of an old-time soda fountain on the side of the Riverview Lounge on Water Street.
“This project got started when Al Smith, a Lowellville resident and car enthusiast, came to my classroom and asked if my art students would be interested in painting a mural in downtown Lowellville,” said Sandi Phillips, the school’s art teacher, in an e-mail. “He was so excited about it. He is affiliated with the car shows that are held here in Lowellville. It’s called Cruzin’ the River.”
The event draws many people with a disc jockey playing ’50s music.
“He thought it would be great to spruce up the side of one of the buildings with something tied in with the era and the whole car-show thing,” Phillips said. “The owners of the Riverview Lounge volunteered their building for us to paint on.”
Smith has been running the car cruise for the last four or five years.
“There’s not much happening in Lowellville anymore — like a lot of other places,” he said.
He wanted to improve the look of the downtown while at the same time, getting the community involved.
“I was originally going to go with a railroad scene with a little watchmen’s shanty,” Smith said. “Then once we got the kids involved, I thought a soda fountain would be the way to go.”
Smith is pleased with the results.
“We get 200 to 500 cars down here every Monday [May through October] and it gives them something to look at instead of just a brick wall,” he said.
They got permission from school administrators and the school board to participate.
“All of my high-school art students participated,” Phillips said of the work done toward the end of last school year and completed last summer. The 34 students received a grade for working on a collaborative painting. Smith brought in a clock that was the scene of the old fashioned soda fountain that students painted on the building.
“My students used the computer to enlarge it and then made stencils to trace it onto the building,” the art teacher said. “We used the stencils and even used two computers and worked in the evening a couple of nights to project the picture onto the wall and then trace it with chalk.” Students worked during school time and during the first part of the summer.
Senior Marisa Sergi said students were assigned different portions of the mural. Because her parents permitted her to scale scaffolding to do her part, she worked on the clock at the mural’s top center as well as part of one of the people seated at the counter.
“It was fun,” Marisa said. “It was a lot different from what I thought it would be. I thought the bricks would be smoother. They were kind of old. They had a lot of cracks so you had to make sure to cover them nicely and evenly.”
She’s happy, though, with the finished product.
One of her classmates, Louie Le- Bron, “worked a lot on the tracing, the outlining and painting the roof of the mural,” he said in an e-mail. “It actually turned out better than I expected it would be, but I guess I should have known it would have turned out good because Ms. Phillips is such great art teacher,” he said. “The process for preparing was hard we had to trace everything in chalk and then paint it. We had a short amount of time to do it, but we got it done. I think I would definitely love to do another project like that again because it took us outside of our learning environment. It made me and my classmates work as a team. I think the final product was great and it will remain in Lowellville as a remembering site for the past and the future.”
One building down from the one students painted used to actually be a soda fountain.
“It was Meehan’s Soda, so we put that name in the painting,” she said. Work on the mural started near the end of the 2009-10 school year so they worked during the first part of summer, too.
“This could not have been made possible if it weren’t for Al Smith,” Phillips said. “He was up on the scaffolds painting right along with me.”
The paint was donated and they borrowed scaffolding from local residents John Schialdone and Bill Meehan.
“This was a challenge for all of us,” Phillips said. “It was something totally new and different for the students, so they were excited and wanted to participate. They painted on canvas and paper before but never on a brick wall. We had to scrape the surface of the wall before it could be painted so the students learned what was involved with the entire process, not just painting. It was a great learning experience.”
After the students’ mural was completed, Smith and the Lowellville Businessmen’s Association hired Hubbard artist Linda Clark to create another mural on a building across the street.
Clark’s mural depicts a drive-in movie and people could pay $50 each to have their car painted in the mural.
Together, the murals changed the look of downtown, Smith said.
“The kids did a super job and Linda did a super job,” he said.
Phillips said that the most rewarding part for her was to see it all come together and listen to the students talk about what part they did and how great it looked.
“They were proud and definitely felt like they had accomplished something worthwhile,” Phillips said. “We had such a mixture of art abilities and talents, yet it all came together.”
The teacher said she and the students met a lot of wonderful people while doing the work.