If you’ve walked around downtown lately, you may have noticed a new splash of color on the side of the CVS building on North Main Street. It’s 24 feet long and vibrant as anything –you can’t miss it.
No, that’s not the pharmacy’s new corporate design, though that would be an interesting idea. It’s actually the product of a handful of artistic minds from the area, and it was made possible by a scholarship program at Kimball-Jenkins Estate.
In January, Kimball-Jenkins started putting the word out that the art institution was looking for kids ages 15 to 19 to work on the Haley Rae Martin Mural Project. Martin was a teen who was passionate about photography and world peace, and this mural reflects that.
The painting shows a silhouette of a girl taking a picture of the world cradled by two hands – a light one and a dark one.
“It didn’t have to be all about her, but it was sort of in memory of her, so we took some pieces that we knew she liked and incorporated them,” said Carla Roy, the artist who facilitated the project.
Martin’s parents, along with BAE Systems and some other local business, started the scholarship fund in 2012 as a way of helping kids attend art camps at Kimball-Jenkins. The mural has a placard in the bottom right corner explaining a little bit about the Haley Rae Martin Mural Project, who Martin was and what this project means in relation to her.
The end result was a welcome injection of energy and life to a former dreary and dilapidated building façade. The mural was unveiled July 8 amid much pomp and circumstance – the mayor was even there!
But how did it all come together in the first place?
“What I thought was going to be a two-month project turned into almost six months,” said Ryan Linehan, managing director at Kimball-Jenkins.
“Participants were charged with the task of planning, presenting and creating a design for a 24-by-12-foot mural,” he said.
Eight people applied and were accepted, and everyone got together once a week to work on things.
“For the first couple weeks, we were brainstorming and having conversations about our plan, and from then on it was just working,” Roy said. “We met every week, and then toward the end we met a few extra times.”
Once the brainstorming phase was over, it was on to design and sketch mode. There were various stages of pencil and marker sketches that formed the outline of the image, and slowly but surely everything was painted over.
The mural was worked on in nine separate panels, and each panel had a projection of the image on it during the work. “We had to refer back to the sketch a lot, too,” Roy said.
The team was made up of about eight or nine artists over the course of the whole project, but some people could only make it some of the time. In the end, there was a core of seven die-hards who were there every session, Roy said.
Griffin Hansen, Madison Godfrey, Kelsie Ward, Amanda Nahodil, Lizzie Busby, Zach Stith and Ella Browne all put in plenty of hours, and some others helped pitch in whenever they could.
The artists seemed to all agree on two things: the project was a lot of fun, and it was a great experience to meet and work with new people.
“The thing I probably enjoyed the most was meeting and becoming friends with everyone,” Godfrey said, according to an email from Kimball-Jenkins.
“I loved it,” Roy said of her experience. “It was a lot of fun. We all became really close, all of us kids – I’m a kid!”
“I absolutely loved it,” said Ward, a 17-year-old entering her senior year at Concord High. “It was hard work, but it was a group of people that, we all got along really well. It was never a chore.”
With such a great response, one might wonder whether there will be more of these projects in the city any time in the near future.
Well, nothing is official just yet, but word on the street is that the folks at Kimball-Jenkins hope to do a similar project again next year.
“Ryan’s scouting out possible locations,” Roy said.
In the meantime, head over to CVS on North Main Street and check out the result of a lot of hard work.
