Every year, for the past eight years, Bob Zabrosky has come and visited Eric Hoover’s art classes to help the students learn new techniques. This year during his 20 days here, he is helping the classes with working on a mural for Hoover’s classroom.
“I helped out with some things. Hoover and I worked together to engineer what we wanted to represent. I was more of a technical adviser,” Zabronsky said.
Hoover’s ceramics classes all drew an idea of what they would like to see as the background and a group of people decided which one was being used.
“We used the scream by Edvard Munchin as the subject matter,” Hoover said. “We had each student in the Ceramics classes to come up with their own twist on scream. So what you see on the table is a mix of the one that was chosen.”
Junior Elle Dalby’s idea was the one that was chosen. She came up with the imagery of it being “don’t cry over spilt milk.”
“She chose the creation of man and used the scream and used don’t cry over spilt milk on why the guy was screaming, which was kind of a play on words,” Hoover said.
Dalby came up with this idea because she wanted an event that would cause the expression on his face, which led to Dalby and her sister, Brooke, thinking of “don’t cry over spilt milk.”
“I asked my family for help coming up with ideas for the sketch,” Dalby said. “I asked them to think of an event that would cause the expression shown on the main subject of the artwork and my sister Brooke replied ‘spilled milk,’ in reference to the saying don’t cry over spilt milk and I thought that would be funny.”
Dalby’s family liked the idea of incorporating another classical art piece into the mural also when deciding on what to design.
“We also thought it would be cool to add in a reference to another classical art piece so I put in the hands from Michelanelgo’s Creation of Adam,” Dalby said.
Hoover’s community service worker, senior Samantha Young, had cut out 80 slabs of clay that the mural is going on.
“I cut out the big slab pieces,” Young said. “So the scream, the hands, the milk carton, the people, all of that I rolled out the slabs and traced and cut them out. I put things on it. I smoothed out all 80 of the tiles.”
Zabrosky wanted to leave it up to the students to work on it and only stepped in to help when needed. He was hoping for it to be a learning experience for them.
“I am a firm believer that when you come into schools you develop kids’ art. I could come in and do this all myself and it would look great, but that’s not what it’s about,” Zabrosky said. “It’s about the students and what they are capable of.”
Several students in Hoover’s classes have been helping with creating the mural.
“It’s been a lot of literal heavy lifting because the clay is really heavy,” Young said. “It’s been very tedious to keep it from drying out. It’s been going really fast and we’ve had a lot of people really putting in a lot of effort into it, which is nice.”
Students got to choose if they wanted to help with creating the design or the tiles, if they chose to work on it.
“Some [students] will work on creating the design, while others will just make the tiles. Everybody sort of got involved in some type of way, no matter what it is,” Zabroksy said.
Dalby stays extra time to help with working on the design, in hopes of it turning out to be what she drew.
“I created the sketch, sculpted the main figure on the mural, and have been working on sculpting other parts and smoothing it out,” Dalby said. “My favorite part of creating the mural is seeing ideas I came up with be made into something like this. Thanks to everyone who has worked on it, it is looking really cool.”
Hoover offered all of his ceramics students the opportunity to work on it, but could focus on their assigned projects if they would rather to.
“I offered every kid that I have the opportunity to work on it, but quite a few people didn’t want anything to do with it. Some people did want to work. It was up to them who wanted to work on it,” Hoover said.
The students who are working on it have added different layers to the mural to add definition and an effect to it.
“I would say it’s coming out even better than I expected,” Dalby said. “The definition that we’ve added by raising some areas and carving out others creates a nice effect. I guess that there are many other ways that it could have gone, but so far I’m very happy with this one.
While Zabrosky will not get to see the mural being finished, he still shares his excitement to see it on his next visit to Altoona.
“I don’t get to see it because the students will be painting it. My favorite part will be when it’s up on the wall. That’s when it’s done,” Zabrosky said.
This project was funded through the Altoona Area School District Educator in Residence program. Many other projects were funded throughout the district including bringing in photographers to work with journalism students.
