AOH Logo

Inside the room that now acts as both classroom and administration room, I added AOH's logo.  Soon, this room will become the student lounge.   

With this last mural, my project is finished.  I do, of course, have several upcoming events inspired by my adventures of the past year.  I will be interviewed this Thursday on WNPR in New Haven.   The Ironman Saint George is coming up in 3 weeks.  Soon after that the Class of 2010 will host a lunch during Reunions to fundraise for Haiti.

Beyond that, who knows!  As the wise Tolkien once wrote,

"The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say."

Academy of Hope Mural

Here's a step by step video I made to record the process of painting the AOH mural:

Finished mural:

I'll be painting their logo on another wall tomorrow.

Brief Reflection on Second Half of Dale Year

It has been almost a year since I received the Martin A. Dale Fellowship to paint murals in shelters and centers for the poor.  At every mural site, people greet me differently.  Sometimes Alzheimers patients yell at me until they realize I was the artist who came yesterday, and the day before.  Sometimes homeless people predict my future.  On January 21st, 2011, I was asked:

"You wanna see something?"

The man who asked it was a student at Strive D.C. in Washington D.C. working hard to find a job.  Unable to think of a reason to say no, I put my brush down and said, "I guess so."

He removed his sunglasses to reveal an empty eye socket.  Then he told me he liked my mural.

Art asks many things of us, but most of all it asks us to confront ourselves.  Those who are braver, those like this man, do not hesitate to look into their souls and bare who they are to the world.  The one eye of a jobless poor man, he was trying to tell me, is more than enough to appreciate beauty.  His gesture was as powerful as it was personal.  In that odd moment of deep sharing, we were still strangers, but only by a little.