Mural at Wolfle music to the eyes

While students are cranking through WASL tests, one local school is trying to bring the often brushed-aside arts back into the framework of public education.

Wolfle Elementary School is embarking on yet another art project for – and with – its students: a hallway mural project to bring to life a formerly stark and staple-punctured surface that kids pass on their way to the music room.

The mural project got underway in February, led by Wolfle music teacher Michael McCurdy and Wolfle alumnus, former art docent and creative thinker, Dori Craze.

When McCurdy took over the position of long-time music instructor Dennis Nicholson, who retired last year, he said Nicholson’s parting gift to him was suggesting the wall outside the music room be transformed with a mural. Nicholson mentioned Craze as just the right person to do the job.

“The environment is really important to learning,” McCurdy said. “The wall was just atrocious.”

McCurdy called up Craze and the mural project took off from there.

“As kids are coming into music, they’ll be getting into that mindset inspired by the mural. They’ll have something beautiful to look at that the kids were involved with,” he said.

The mural will be sectioned into panels depicting nature, and of course, musical elements. Wolfle students helped with the design, providing input and samples of artwork.

Craze said she asked students, “ ‘ What would you like to see in there?’ and boy howdy, there were stacks and stacks of drawings, lots with guitars and pianos.”

She took the student artwork and incorporated it into the design, which features a winding keyboard, musical notes, clarinets, trees and other elements.

The wall is over 40 feet long and 10 feet in height at its highest point. After putting down a white base coat, Craze blocked out where the individual panels will go. Three on one side of the wall will depict windows ‘looking out’ onto landscapes. Five on the opposite, longer hallway will blend together as a “conglomeration of fantasy, music and color,” Craze said.

The background was painted a bright shade of green. Once Craze sketches in the design, students will fill in basic color components and then she’ll finish up with shading and fine lines. Other teachers are pitching in, helping with some of the background painting. “Everybody’s been fantastic” she said.

Kingston Lumber provided paint for the project at cost, donated supplies and is providing scaffolding that’s safe for the older kids to be on while painting the higher portions of the wall.

The mural is a work-in-progress though Craze said she’d like to have it complete by the end of the school year. “It just depends on time and how it flows.”

Craze is more than familiar with Wolfle. She started attending school there and went on to graduate from North Kitsap High School. She worked as an art docent for 10 years – at Wolfle while her own kids were students there and at other district programs.

Besides a passion for art, Craze shares McCurdy’s love of music. She’s a vocalist in regional bands including Soul Survivors and Freddy Pink. McCurdy, a drummer for 30 years, is a member of The Blues Counselors, a band comprised of musicians who also work at schools in North Kitsap. Coincidentally, Freddy Pink and The Blues Counselors will both perform at the Kingston Fourth of July concert in Mike Wallace Park.

The value of art

Wolfle Principal Ben Degnin is excited about the mural project, too. Because of WASL testing and No Child Left Behind mandates, he knows much classroom time is spent “hammering on the reading and the writing and the math. And we’ve lost the arts,” Degnin said. “We’re trying to bring back that balance in life. Art is a way to give value to a lot of things we have and bring back joy in life and learning.”

The hallway mural is one piece of the emphasis to bring art back to the curriculum.

Another example of this is the Story Pole created by master carvers of the S’Klallam Tribe that was raised with great ceremony in front of the school last fall. An interactive salmon mural inside the school was dedicated in February depicting a map of the region and different locations of salmon habitats, also a collaborative effort with the S’Klallam, Department of Fish and Wildlife and students from Kingston Middle School.

“We’re trying not to do it in isolation,” Degnin said. “We’re trying to integrate arts with reading, math, culture, social studies … involving kids in it, too, is a crucial piece.”

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