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Emma Turner's Excellent Adventure
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Donors and Helpers |
Emma's experience designing and painting this mural made such an impression on her she decided to write her college essay about it: The mural needs a frog. A jumping frog. The frog should have a party hat on. No, scratch the party hat. That’s where it started. Staring at a blank wall for most of my summer, I had ideas coursing through my brain. I imagine it’s similar to what love would do sprinting through blue veins, making a balloon of happiness in your stomach clog your vision with dreams. I had to get these ideas out onto to the wall. Yet the wall looked lost. It belongs to the front of the Schiff Nature Preserve Center which sits in the middle of 640 acres of wild land in my town. A stucco blotch of fifty by twelve feet sitting like a forgotten child in a jungle, crying because his lollipop just fell. Or, more realistically, because he is a boring, white wall. I could feel myself shrinking whenever I looked at it. Its size overwhelming, and its emptiness, terrifying. I had never seen something so lifeless. Even the radiator in my bedroom has more energy; it’s painted silver and if you look closely you can see notes I’ve written that have fallen between its grates. So I, Emma Bronwyn Turner, whose fascinated with the inside bubble of concord grapes, was going to make the wall beautiful. I would become a muralist. Beginning was the hardest part. Once you run a mile, everything after becomes a rhythm. Thoughts bubbled up and floated to my consciousness. They came to me through simple things. I would go into my bathroom and flick on both light switches, even though only one works, and have an idea. I would be eating beets at the dinner table, using them to dye my lips purple, and suddenly concepts were born. Then I’d be off, drawing away on scraps of paper. Thoughts would hit me in the middle of the night. And they would haunt me until I forced myself to rush out of bed and write them down with the nearest utensils. Once it was “blueberry bush” written with lipstick on the back of a receipt for pudding. Sometimes it felt like I was the organized collector of these scraps of paper, arranged mentally in a leather-bound notebook. Other times it felt like I was in a room with 100 televisions turned onto different stations. There was Flora and Fauna on channel 3 and Animals of New Jersey on 14. But then there were distraction channels. Channel 78 was the Jell-O Show where I watched people compete for the strangest shaped Jell-O. Most of the time, though, ideas just floated around my head. My reality had slipped into a mural world. I lived in a scale model of the wall which I layered in shells of tracing paper: each level more advanced than the last. Eventually I had created a face for this featureless wall. As my ideas were coagulating, publicity took up in full swing: newspapers, blog, bake sale. The wall was cleaned and primed, and I began to translate my composition to the white cement. Charcoal outlines of leaves clouded my eyes; a boy with binoculars, a dragonfly perched on a stem of grass. At night I could no longer play hot lava in the living room without my mind prophesying that the brown paint would run out first tomorrow. I discovered that a 10 year old volunteer dripping paint everywhere wasn’t terrible, but his making me laugh and my consequently spilling a bucket of paint was bad. Sometimes I wanted to melt into the plants and grasses in the wall. Get lost in the land I had created and hide from the reality of unfinished turtles and tall ladders. Yet amid all the wildlife of Schiff, the mural, and my head, my ten foot frog continues to proudly leap in midair. That’s where it ends. July 1, 2010 - During the winter, a couple of us were sitting around making a wish list of all the things we would do "if we had time." One of the items on that list was to paint the front of the nature center. We didn't mean freshen it up with a new coat of paint, we meant paint it. Cover it with some wild, beautiful artwork that tells every visitor who pulls up our driveway that they can expect to find a vibrant, fun place when they come to Schiff. But who would do it, we wondered? And how would we mange it? We felt overwhelmed. The thought wound up on a dry-erase board labeled, "Big Ideas." Enter Emma Turner, a rising senior at West Morris Mendham High School. A young, enthusiastic art student looking for a big project to devote herself to. "We have that here," we said. She found an advisor at school, Mr. Harry Douglas. She and her friends ran a bake sale at King's in Mendham through their group "Fill the Need" to pay for paint and supplies. We even have our first donor: Schiff member Buzz Grimm has agreed to donate scaffolding from his contracting business for the project. And we haven't even really started yet. One thing we know for sure at Schiff is that we never say no to enthusiasm. So, this is the summer that we welcome Emma and her band of merry painters to turn the front of this nature center into something magnificent. We have a theme: "Where Wild Things Happen Naturally." By the end of the summer, our nature center will have a whole new look. We'll post brief updates here throughout the summer, and also on our new blog. If you'd like to help, we're posting our wish list and a running list of donors and helpers here. Once it's finished, we'll have an unveiling of sorts. We can't wait. But we have a lot of work to do in the meantime, so we' re going to get started. Emma's Designs:
July 11, 2010 - Emma sketched out her designs on the front of the building
July 15, 2010 - Emma started painting!
July 16, 2010 - Emma's still working...
Emma's off for a few weeks, and we'll spend that time lining up donors and helpers! |
Goal: $2,000
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Wish List |
Schiff Nature Preserve • 973.543.6004 • 339 Pleasant Valley Road, Mendham, NJ 07945 •