Brightening the high school’s halls

September 23, 2009

By Laura Geggel

Mount Si student spends summer on school mural

By Laura Geggel

Mixing a few buckets of house paint with a dollop of creative skill, Mount Si High School senior Tricia Prewitt volunteered a month of her summer vacation time to paint a mural showcasing robots and cameras amid painted spotlights at the high school.

With the exception of a few wildcat and wildflower wall decorations, most of Mount Si’s walls are white. Last September, Web multimedia teacher Joe Dockery decided his corner of the school needed a dash of color.

“I picked Tricia because she’s a fantastic artist.” Dockery said. “She’s been in my digital imaging production class for a while now, so I knew how talented she was.”

The neighboring teacher, photography teacher Jim Gibowski liked the idea of a mural and asked Prewitt to incorporate images and vocabulary from his class into the painting.

The quiet but artistic redhead needed no more prompting. She designed a mural with a multicolored filmstrip along the edge. Each frame in the filmstrip sports the language of both classes, with words like ‘cropping,’ ‘zoom’ and ‘f-stop.’

After meeting several times throughout the year, Prewitt, Dockery and Gibowski chose a final design and agreed to fund the cost of paint from their department’s budget.

Prewitt got to work after school administrators approved the plan.

On Dockery’s side of the wall, Prewitt painted a Web site filled with robots next to a video camera and a spotlight. Gibowski’s wall received a red-striped camera on a tripod beneath paintings of two photographs taken by students — one of a cityscape at sunrise and the other of the Golden Gate Bridge peeping out from the grey fog.

Prewitt has taken her fair share of art classes, in addition to her Web multimedia interests.

“My family’s really into sports and I’m not,” Prewitt said. “I doodle.”

But the mural turned into a family affair. Prewitt’s 12-year-old sister, Elizabeth, helped paint and her father, Lee, helped her select the right type of paint.

“I helped her with a little moral support and helped her with a little bit of the painting, but it was her design and she had selected the colors,” Lee Prewitt said.

Students and teachers alike have been murmuring praise for Prewitt’s mural.

“I think it’s going to spur other departments to paint their walls,” Gibowski said. “It’s just an eye catcher.”

More murals could add to school and student pride, said Assistant Principal Beth Castle. But murals are permanent and teachers sometimes switch classrooms, so each mural would need to undergo a review process, Castle said.

As for Prewitt’s mural, “I loved the colors and the whole theme of that area of the school being tied in,” Castle said. “It’s very professional looking.”

Dockery agreed.

“I’ve had just tons of teachers and students compliment us on the mural, and many of them are saying this is what we need around the entire school,” Dockery said. “I think Tricia is going to be a busy girl, even if she does half of the requests we have now based on the one she’s done.”

Laura Geggel: 392-6434 ext. 221 or lgeggel@snovalleystar.com. Comment at www.snovalleystar.com.

Tricia Prewitt, a Mount Si High School senior, painted a photography and web multimedia mural at the high school over the summer. Photo by Laura Geggel

Mount Si student spends summer on school mural