Paint Crew: Murals, pantings, walls and more.
Ada Lambert | November 17, 2022
Warren Wilson College (WWC) is home to many artists of different mediums. In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of students who want to do larger scale projects around campus, including murals, paintings or simple designs in academic buildings. The Paint Crew has been responsible for multiple of these new additions to campus, despite the fact that their initial job criteria does not require any artistic ability and is meant to teach students how to effectively paint walls.
This semester, Paint Crew supervisor Dave Marshall is seeking out new artists to join the crew, especially if they are interested in doing murals on campus. His intention is to give students the opportunity to potentially work on a crew that is directly tied to doing murals/artwork around the school.
“Eventually, what I see happening is us being split into the Paint Crew and the Mural Crew but still starting off with the Paint Crew,” Marshall said. “You would come onto the Paint Crew for a year and you would learn how to paint blank walls, fix holes — that kind of stuff — and that way when we pass you off to the Mural Crew, you would already know all of the basics.”
Marshall started contemplating this idea last spring when one of his students, Thea Nettleton, sophomore, wanted to do a mural for their art class and incorporate that into their work on the Paint Crew.
Nettleton was unsure at first — as it was their first mural — but with the encouragement of Marshall and their art teacher, Lara Nguyen, they decided to create an Octopus mural in honor of it being their favorite animal.
This mural now resides in lower Witherspoon, one of the science buildings on campus.
“I started with a digital sketch and I really tried to make it super intensive because I wasn't sure how I would do the mural,” Nettleton said. “So I went into the sketch thinking, ‘if I have to transfer this to paints, how am I going to do that?’ I started there, and then, because we live in a digital age, I used a projector on the wall to project that sketch that I had done to get it to scale and then I traced the outline.”
Throughout Nettleton’s process, they have received support from their other crewmates as well.
Ephraim Grey, a junior on the Paint Crew, wanted to provide whatever assistance they could give to help Nettleton with the strenuous task.
“(Nettleton) has done a stunning, incredible job with the painting,” Grey said. “I have mostly been there to assist them with moral support to keep them sane because it's a lot of work that they have to do and also helping a little bit with some of the basic paintings so that they can focus on the finer details to make it beautiful.”
Grey initially joined the Paint Crew last spring after their previous crew supervisor left the school, but quickly fell in love with the crew for its flexibility and room for creative expression.
“There was still a certain degree to which you were able to work with (Marshall) and feel like you had agency and autonomy within your work,” Grey said. “You might be working by yourself or with partners and you're always made to feel like what you're doing is important and that you're an important part of it. But also not being stressed out about it.”
Nettleton had a similar experience with joining the crew — they had no idea that they would have the opportunity to paint a mural but they wanted to learn more about painting itself.
“I'm an artist and I want to be an artist,” Nettleton said. “Having some sort of trade skill, though, is a good backup plan since contract painters make decent money. I knew that I was going to get a new skill set out of it, so that if I'm falling short on artwork, I can just be a contract painter and still make enough money to get by.”
The crew has allowed students coming from all different art backgrounds to choose what projects they take part in while still having the opportunity to generate ideas for themselves and others.
“If you want to work on a mural, but you yourself are not super artistically inclined,” Grey said. “There are more geometric types of designs that we can do that don't necessarily require a super fine hand, but rather the same paint principles that you maintain throughout your basic painting processes, just with a little bit more artistic refinement.”
With the growing success of the murals on campus, Marshall wants to continue encouraging new artists to join the crew if it piques their interest.
“I'm really excited by the murals that we've started to do on campus,” Grey said. “Even if it doesn't necessarily become an official crew, (Marshall) still very much has made it clear that we want to try to beautify the campus more and more.”