I got to know Paula Clayton towards the end of her visitor program at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, about three years ago. Paula is talkative enough that it brings out my more introverted side, and in those early conversations, I mostly nodded. Come to find out, Paula is a professional muralist. And as we got to talking, and Paula came to the class I teach for each visitor session on natural building, which includes a tour of the Hub, the more excited Paula became about my project. We decided to collaborate on a mural for the Hub.

That was the year the Hub building crew built a large shed out of pallets and pallet boards. Part of it was for wood storage and part was a workshop. By the time we finished it and moved everything into it, it was full. The west exterior wall faced the gravel road and was the first thing to notice when walking the grassy path toward the Hub. It was the perfect place for a mural. I wanted to use the Japanese concept of miegakure, or partial view. There were trees and bushes that would obscure part of the mural, heightening curiosity in the human mind, and luring people down the path. Many people walk the gravel loop road that passes along one side of the Hub. My idea was to leave a small grove of trees between the road and the mural, providing a partial view of the mural, or a full view of it in the winter, once the trees lost their leaves. I was hoping this changing view of the mural would generate additional curiosity and interest in the mural, beyond its innate color and visual interest, which is what miegakure is all about.

Once we got excited about collaborating, she asked to get some input on what the mural should be about from me and the five crew members working at the Hub at the time. She wanted to do a preliminary sketch after that to make sure she understood what we were looking for. We spent less than 20 minutes on a group collaboration and I learned so much from it! She had us close our eyes and visualize different colors, textures, high level themes and specific images. She then collected from everyone what they saw in their visualization. And the next morning she showed me a black and white sketch that was amazing!

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December 2 is Giving Tuesday. This year, we’re aiming to raise $5,000 for our Mutual Aid, Network Building and Activism (MANA) Fund. This will be used to support Rabbits in self-organized excursions with the goals of building regional solidarity, supporting inspiring projects and vulnerable communities, and advocating for positive social change. To create a broad and meaningful impact we want to build mutually supportive relationships with values-aligned people, farms, projects, communities and organizations in our region, and beyond. You can help make this possible by donating now through December 2. Thanks for considering!

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Paula came back to DR several months after her visitor program, and worked on the mural over the course of three weeks. She left it unfinished, saying half jokingly that that would leave open a reason to return to DR in the future. Other people can’t tell that it is unfinished. As I learned while working with Paula, unfinished can also mean not being done adding to something, infinitely into the future. I now have some projects at the Hub that are like that, projects that I hope to add to indefinitely into the future.

Paula has mastered the art of persuading staff at paint shops in Chicago, where she lives, to donate paint samples to her projects, which are often for nonprofit groups. So she has many small paint jars of many colors to choose from for her murals. She used exterior house paint for the Hub mural. We treated the pallet boards on the side of the shed with wood preservative solution before adding the colored paint.

I agreed to Paula doing this mural with many assumptions that were different from hers. That’s where the “butt kicking” came in. I assume I am not a mural painter. Yes, I paint color on walls and I love to do it, but I don’t paint images on walls. The only image drawing I do is to work out building designs or to communicate my designs to others, and my sketches are horrible, but just recognizable enough to get the job done. I also assumed that because she was the professional muralist, all I had to do was say yes to her coming to DR, provide her a place to eat at one of our co-op kitchens and a place to sleep in one of the lofts at the Hub. Easy peasy. And while she did her thing, I would do my thing on the building project, separately.

Within minutes of her arrival at DR, helping her unload the many items stuffed into her Prius, I had a sinking feeling that my life for the next few weeks was being upended. Lots of items she collected from, as she put it, “back alleys of Chicago,” went into a big pile next to the mural wall. Bed springs, aluminum window frames, and metal construction straps. Bicycle fenders and spokes. Urban detritus for a natural building project. I felt like something was going horribly wrong.

We quickly unloaded the car and she started asking me what part I wanted to play in the mural. I had nothing to offer. I had spent zero amount of time thinking about it. I had already mentally handed the whole thing over to her. So I explained. I made excuses. I verbalized my limiting beliefs about my drawing and painting abilities. And even while I was saying all of this, I was refuting myself in my head, because I did think of myself as an artist, in the area of natural building: wood working, clay plaster forms, and natural colors, textures and materials.

So while she set up and organized her work station and took a rest for a few hours that afternoon, I went home, my brain burning, feeling embarrassed and irritated, and trying to let go of all the plans I had made for the month. And yes, I brought out my college ruled notebook and started brainstorming, cramming for the college level, seat-of-your-pants art course I now found myself enrolled in.

One thing I had to my advantage: I had spent years refining the vision for the Hub project. I was clear on what it was about. And Paula was clear in the vision that had been given to her from the crew in our visualizing session; nothing had changed in her first sketch. So in the end, I brought my vision of bringing nature into the Hub in as many forms as possible, to the mural, which had many nature themes in it. I decided that my contribution would be to bring nature to the mural, in a multi-dimensional way, and think of ways that people could interact with the mural, in addition to looking at it.

What I tried to do in the next several weeks was to integrate natural objects like log wafers and bark stripped off of logs with some of the metal objects that Paula brought with her, matching them to different sections of the mural, each of which had an air, water, earth and fire color scheme and theme. We developed the idea of hanging a branch on the mural, near the top, so that people in future workshops could write aspirations and tie them to the branch, where they could wave in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags. Paula had me add screws to a tree she painted, and she painted the screws to blend in.

Here is the beginning:

And some beginning layers of color, with the tree branch at the top. Can you see the hands?

And more of the color layers:

And where we left it:

Each section has a pair of hands using a construction tool. The hands are drawn from my hands and some of the crew members’ hands. Cool, eh?

The bird’s nest was built by a real bird, who spontaneously inserted her life cycle into our mural.

Paula continued to challenge me, without trying to, by just being herself. And in the end, the result was what often happens when two people go through a trial together; we formed a strong connection and produced something that was better for it.

Liz Hackney is the editor of this newsletter and frequent contributor. She still won’t go as far as calling herself an artist, but there’s still time to move into it.