SEARCY — As part of a downtown mural project, Harding University art students are learning teamwork and the value of volunteering.
Daniel Adams, professor of art at Harding, said seven of eight panels depicting life in White County have been completed since 2008. The panels are on the Spruce Street side of a building owned by the county tax assessor’s office. The eighth panel was painted Saturday.
“My idea was to find out how well the students work together, in compressed time and space,” Adams said.
The students who have worked on the murals also accompany Adams on mission trips to Ghana, West Africa, where they paint school classrooms.
“We have limited time to paint in the classrooms because we are displacing the students while we are there,” Adams said. “In each grade,the murals change depending on the educational level of the students. The idea was to have a training ground here in Searcy.”
Adams said the students also give back to the local community.
“Ministry does not have to be a foreign thing,” he said. “Searcy has blessed us.”
Once Adams received permission from the county to do the project, paint was donated anonymously, and a local construction company donated scaffolding.
“Originally, my idea was to do one panel a year. That way, I’d have a training ground for about eight years,” Adams said, “but we actually got the first one done in a day. It started to rain, and I had to come back later and do some repairs. Then I thought we’d do two a year, in the fall and spring semesters.”
Work on the panels accelerated to such a pace that three were finished last year, andthe final panel was painted last weekend.
Each panel depicts a different aspect of White County life: industry, health care, agriculture, natural gas, higher education, the arts, local history and aspects of faith, Adams said.
“I knew I had eight spots,” he said. “If I could divide them up, I started thinking about the eight major areas of life in our county.”
The thriving local industrial base, he said, as well as farming and a “sizable higher-education component,” suggested themselves as subjects.
“We also have a thriving cultural atmosphere,” Adams said. “We’ve got a downtown nonprofit dinner theater and an art gallery. … The arts do really well here.”
Adams said he decided the best way to present the different facets of local life was to create a collage of each.
“I’d photograph the different icons and manipulate those into a composition,” Adams said.
It takes a couple of hours to “grid the space,” Adams said.
Then the elements of the composition are drawn on the panel. Each panel is monochromatic.
“The reason for that is the time crunch,” Adams said. “Keeping it one color plus four of its values saves time.”
The students fill in each 1-foot-by-1-foot grid square.
He said four to six art students work on the project per year, and thus far, they have all proven their ability to work together in a small space.
“No one’s bucked the system yet,” Adams said.
The project is designed to make the students work quickly. Artistic ability is, in this case, beside the point, Adams said.
“Most have already [had experience] painting and drawing,” he said. “This is teaching them how to scale up.”
The project also gives thestudents a chance to leave something of themselves behind in Searcy.
“When they graduate, they’ll leave knowing they still have a connection to Searcy,” he said. “This is their contribution to the downtown area.”
The final mural, which, unlike the other “Crayon-color” murals, is in black and white, focuses on caregivers.
“The central section will be a painting that resembles stained glass,” Adams said, “and will capture all of the colors of the murals before it. People will be able to recognize the snippets of images that will surround the stained glass.”
Staff writer Daniel A. Marsh can be reached at (501) 399-3688 or dmarsh@arkansasonline.com.
Three Rivers, Pages 45 on 03/29/2012