Kayleen ’25 connects with their community members new and old to paint a mural representing diversity and celebrating the community.
I’ve come a long way since the last update. What was once an empty, freshly power-washed fence is now decorated with flowers of all shapes, sizes, and colors. What began as a simple email welcoming participants to join is now a 43-email-long thread involving nearly twenty people that I have somehow managed to keep track of.
Partnering with my town’s cultural council for the fourth year in a row, I present my magnum opus. This year, I sought to create a community mural titled “Most Beautiful Flowers in Your Eye”, where different members of the community could paint a flower of their choosing on the fence. These flowers would then come together on the fence, creating a colorful garden of diversity and celebrating the variety we have in Hopkinton.
This whole process has been very insightful and enjoyable. Each day, different people with varying levels of experience in art come to paint their flowers. Each person’s style is unique, and the amount of space they cover varies. People come with different flowers in mind and different reasons for choosing that particular flower. Reasons have ranged from flowers they have wanted but never had the chance, to flowers they have planted before, to a parent’s favorite flower in memory of a lost family member, to simply finding a flower pretty, or the flower holding a special cultural significance, such as the locust flower, which symbolizes of honesty, goodness, beauty and purity in Asian cultures.
Painters range from seven to seventy in age. There were parents and their children collaborating on the same flower, art enthusiasts who came back for multiple sessions just to paint more flowers, a local policeman who joined us spontaneously and painted pink turnips, and a new resident in our town who wanted to participate in local community activities to get to know the neighbors. One volunteer even bought a flower painting book, practicing at home before finally painting her flower.
Throughout the painting process, I have received multiple compliments from different strangers as they pass by in their cars calling the flowers colorful and beautiful. I am glad that through this project I can bring a little more beauty into people’s lives.
At the moment, the mural is almost complete after six sessions of work. There remains only the last session to finish writing the words and finalize the details.
I’m grateful to the CSGC for once again giving me the opportunity to continue creating art that celebrates diversity and the volunteers who left me with special memories of the summer.
