Making Art with Business School Students

I sketched a mural today.

Peggy's starting up her second year of business school this week, and she and a group of various MBA students were assigned to paint a mural on one of the dorm floors at an Atlanta halfway house. She and her group agreed on an idea yesterday -- a literal "road to recovery" -- and Peggy asked me to come in today and help them draw it onto an institutional yellow cinder block wall.

No one had seen the space we were supposed to paint on, so when I saw it today I was taken aback. One, it was twice as wide as what I'd envisioned. Two, we were supposed to paint not only the wall in front of us, but another wall just as large on the other side of this one. So, stated simply, our actual project was the project I'd envisioned, cubed. And since we were all booted out of the facility at 4PM, we had just two and a half hours to sketch our mural on both walls. So we got to work. Because a road stretching out to the horizon with a couple uplifting highway signs and encouraging billboards is really just straight lines and geometric shapes subjected to the laws of perspective, the sketching didn't require much in the way of artistic ability, so once we figured out the perspective, it was just a matter of getting the lines right.

I'm worried that we saved too much work for tomorrow, however, because tomorrow's painting day, and though we can also come back on Friday to finish it off, no one wants to do that, so no matter what this group is going to have those walls painted with something by tomorrow. I don't know much about paint, acrylic or otherwise, or the rules of color, so we'll all be flying blind. We'll see. I'll post up a picture of the finished product when I can, but I'll let you know how it went tomorrow.