COVENTRY - Until just a few weeks ago, the walls at Tiogue School were drab and dreary. The cinderblock construction was bare of color and creativity.
Today, it's a different story. As you walk down the halls in the Coventry elementary school, your eyes are drawn to beautiful and vibrant colors splashed onto the walls. Using money from fundraisers, the school hired Claudette DelPozzo, the owner of the Claudette DelPozzo Art Studio in West Warwick, to come to the school and guide its students through the painting of six murals.
"I had heard about Claudette [DelPozzo] and the beautiful work that she does through the grapevine, so, once I thought we had raised enough money, I called her and asked if she would be interested in coming to our school to do some murals here," Meghan Smith, the Tiogue School art teacher, said.
Smith said she requested DelPozzo select various Rhode Island landmarks as the theme for the murals.
Together they chose the state capitol, a mansion in Newport, the Westerly carousel, a setting from the zoo, a setting from Western Coventry, the Narragansett Towers and the Newport Bridge as the images for the murals.
"Until Claudette [DelPozzo] came in, the walls at our school were really bare and boring. There were a few paintings, but they had been done by students who went here years ago, so, to the kids who go to school here now, they were really just pictures with no meaning," Smith said. "I really wanted to do something this year with the money that we raised through the Box Tops [for Education] program that would have meaning for the kids that go to school here now."
That is why Smith said she asked DelPozzo to select Rhode Island-themed images.
"I wanted the kids to be able to paint images that they might be familiar with," she said.
Smith said the school's principal, Denise Ritarick, arranged to have every single student in the school paint some portion of at least one of the murals. The children were excused from their classrooms in groups for a brief time to participate in the painting. Each group was given specific instruction from DelPozzo but then given free rein to paint its own little area of the masterpiece.
"The only thing I make sure to tell the kids is to pull up their sleeves and put on an apron," DelPozzo said. "Other than that, they can go ahead and paint away. Even if they don't do exactly as I instruct, it's OK, because I can basically correct anything that they do."
"The basic idea with this incorporation is to give the kids the opportunity to take part in something like this so that, when they walk down the hallway, they can point to the painting and say, 'I painted that,' and already I have heard them say it," she said.
As beautiful as the murals are, the student and professional artists cannot take complete credit for the work. In addition to their own natural talents, DelPozzo also used an artistic method called decoupage to complete the murals. Decoupage is a style of crafts where the artist cuts out a picture, glues the picture into the midst of a painting and then gently coats the picture with a few coats of glue to protect it. To complete the decoupage design, the artist touches up the glued picture with a little bit of blending paint, DelPozzo said.
The school raised the funding to hire DelPozzo through the Box Tops for Education program. All year long, students collect Box Tops, the familiar 10¢ Box Tops coupon on hundreds of products made by General Mills, Smith said. All of the Box Tops that are turned in are given to a student's mother who collects them for the school. Then, at the end of the year, the mom tallies up the Box Tops and the school's students vote on how they want to invest the funding. It was at the end of last year that the students voted to create the murals, said Smith.