Kendal was right: it is a bit of a challenge to buy acrylic paint as we know it in the US...or even interior latex paint (the cheaper alternative for murals), it seems. We could have tried an art store in a marketplace an hour and a half away from the school, where apparently no buses go, but instead decided to get a few liters (?) of plain white paint that is "acrylic" according to the salesperson at a local variety store (which sells everything from yard sculptures to seed packets to paint). She also directed us to small bottles of pigment we could use to color this paint. After being sure that the paint would be water-based and quick-drying, I figured we could use this dyed white acrylic at least for the main 2 or 3 background colors of the mural. To complicate things further, the store did not have any blue pigment, which we would need for the river, but I did have some blue acrylic paint I had brought from home that we could maybe mix in. Hey, art is all about experimentation, and this was going to be a mural that incorporates many styles and voices. We would also use some of the small amounts of Utrecht store-brand "student grade" acrylic paint I was able to lug in my suitcase from NYC for key details of the mural like the stencils and abstract graffifi futuristic background.
Needless to say, this paint-buying excursion took longer than I thought and meant that I was even more worried about having enough time to complete the mural, as I had wanted to get started drawing the design on the wall and mixing the colors much earlier in the day, before the group arrived. Instead, we ate some surprisingly good school cafeteria food (I'd love to find a school lunch in NYC served with freshly baked sourdough bread and iced tea from real tea leaves!) with some of the teachers who apparently conversed in Russian about being happy with how the project is going.
Once we got started working on the wall, around 3pm, I was pleasantly surprised by how much we got done, and how much ownership the students had over the project. The teachers rounded up some students early on to help cover the floor with newspapers and move the chairs(which it turned out, are not attached to the wall after all). Group members kept arriving and I gave them different tasks to draw parts of the mural, help mix paint colors (the pigment thing worked ok, though I was initially very frightened by the amount of water that had settled at the top of the paint...and I would have liked the colors of the background a little darker, maybe use 2 bottles of pigment next time around...but on the bright side, this way it matches the pastel colors of the entire school building). The student, Nastya, who had offered to blow up the stencil drawings arrived around 4:30 with larger photocopies than I had expected, which looked amazing! Several students started laying out where the stencils would go on the wall, while Alex drew in the entire Krasnoyarsk skyline much faster and better than I could have done on my own!
When we started painting, the group did not need a lot of guidance in order to figure out which color goes where, and how to paint neat, straight edges. The main moment of tension came when a few students expressed a strong desire to draw their own abstract, street-artist inspired designs behind the main skyline, to represent the "future Krasnoyarsk." At first I had doubts about how this would fit with our overall design and whether we would have time to do it, but Alex had already started drawing a large section before I could stop him. I quickly realized that not only were the students passionate about this aspect of the mural; it actually could become one of the most interesting and essential elements, as the style of the designs was highly sophisticated and distinct, like a cross between Miro and Mission District street artists. I did feel the need to maintain a degree of control over these more freestyle sections so when Alex wanted to paint his section and began to take primary colors on a pallette, I suggested that he put some more thought into mixing very specific colors that would look good with the rest of the mural, and talk them over with the group. This seemed to work well, yielding some subtle yellow-green and magenta tones that everyone liked.
I was overall very impressed with these students, whose combined talents can clearly produce a mural that is much more interesting than what I would have come up with on my own. Slava and I were talking later about how perhaps they needed my visit to Krasnoyarsk as the inspiration to come together for such a project, and that it would be great if they continued to make murals for different parts of the city on their own, e.g., as a mural team. I could picture energetic murals brightening up the snowy winter streets, maybe commissioned by shop owners to cover up the scattered graffiti tags on their walls. At least, that's how it sometimes works in the United States...
I hope that things also go smoothly tomorrow--but I at least feel more confident that we will finish the project before I leave!
No comments:
Post a Comment