Workshop 1 with participants

On my second day in Krasnoyarsk, the thermomer outside read, "-8 celsius". This is considered warm for a November day here. It is around 16 degrees Farenheit, about as cold as it gets on the 14 or so very coldest days of the year in NYC. I am lucky because last week, before I got here, the forecast read - 20 or -25 celsius every day.

Despite the temparature, the streets outside were sunny and welcoming as we walked to our morning meeting with the teachers at the school where the mural will be. The site itself is an upstairs area  right next to a library where people congregate and also hang shows of children's artwork. There are 3 large walls we could potentially cover. We talked to the school administration about my past work and ideas for themes and they were both excited and open to trying out different things, and it looks like we can do a permanent projcet directly on the wall. One thing we discussed was changing the color of the wall which is a light sort of pastel pea green--the kind of color I'd love to paint over entirely if time would allow, but it probably will not so this is a challenge I have to think about.

At the workshop, I took the 20 or so young participants upstairs to look at the space, and brought up the theme of the "Ideal Krasnoyarsk" again in the classroom. In these community mural workshops I noramally like to do a verbal/written brainstorm where students come up with words they associate with the theme and use the words as a basis for imagery, but this was obviously going to be difficult even with a translator. But the group had no trouble getting into a heated discussion amongst themselves in response to some basic quesitons I threw out like "what are some problems in your city you want to solve?" and "what is your vision for the future" and "how can we symbolize this through very simple, graphic symbols  we can make in a very short time?" 

The group came up with an initial idea together of preserving the past of Krasnoyarsk and looking to the future on two adjacent walls. They were responding to the issue of new buildings rapidly going up, and developers tearing down older houses and landmarks without thinking of preserving history. THey want to create stencils of images of the past in black & white on "pages" flowing from a book across the mural, with a more colorful "present" cityscape image behind them. They chose to end the workshop early so they could work more on sketches of this from home to bring in the next day.

The challenge will definitely be taking their drawings and ideas and  scaling it down to an overall image that can realistically be done in just 4 days. The main challenge I think will be finding a way to paint the background so that it expresses the idea of the present city, but perhaps without having to conver the entire huge walls with paint. More to come tomorrow...