Art club hits field building with 'good graffiti'

May 8, 2008

BY EMILY McFARLAN Staff Writer

ELGIN -- The group of about 25 fifth-graders huddled with dripping paintbrushes around the announcer's booth at the Trout Park baseball field after school on April 30.

They had walked to the park at Dundee Avenue and Trout Park Boulevard from Coleman Elementary School. At the park, they splashed a coat of light-blue paint on the green stone booth.

Bill Vincent, the park's director of baseball, called it "good graffiti."

Vincent invited the fifth-graders, members of Coleman art teacher Ann Calverley's fifth- and sixth-grade Art Club, to paint murals at the neighborhood park after his wife, Sally Vincent, was a student teacher with Calverley in the fall. It is something he had wanted to see for a while, he said.

Calverley and Sally Vincent had brought club members to Trout Park to sketch their ideas and plan what they wanted to paint on the park's announcer's booth and concessions stand.

"We're painting people watching the game and eating popcorn," said Hector Hernandez, 11. "It's going to be cool."

The previous week, the club's 15 sixth-graders began painting hot dogs, popcorn and other foods on the park's concession stand.

Vincent said he left it up to Calverley and her students to decide what to paint, as long as it was "something baseball-oriented."

"I just gave them the paint and a place to do this," he said.

Calverley said she started the Art Club shortly after she began teaching at Coleman 12 years ago to give the oldest students with an extra interest in art a little more time with her to work on projects. She sees each grade only once a week.

Since then, the club has grown, so she alternates weekly meetings with fifth- and sixth-graders on Wednesday afternoons.

"It is fun, and every year it's grown," Calverley said. "It really loses its meaning when you have 50 kids. ... I try to keep it so I feel like I can connect more with the kids."

Other Art Club projects have included creating three-dimensional shapes and designing posters for the school, according to 11-year-old Vince Camarena, who said he joined the club because he likes to sketch. But painting at Trout Park, where he said he sometimes watches baseball games with his family, definitely has been the coolest project.

"I'm going to be famous!" Vince said.

Art Club usually disbands by May, Calverley said, but this year's long winter and the rainy spring weather prevented the students from painting outside sooner.

Sixth-graders were expected to finish painting the concessions stand at the baseball field this week. If the fifth-graders don't finish the announcer's booth mural before school lets out for the summer, Calverley said she may invite the students, who live in the neighborhood, to paint on Saturdays or over the summer, or they may touch up the mural next fall as sixth-grade members of the Art Club.

"They've been looking forward to this because they've known about it since the fall," Calverley said. "I think we've kept a lot of kids in the Art Club because they've known this was coming."

Sally and Bill Vincent said they were just as excited for the kids to take ownership in their neighborhood park.

"Our place is really for high school and college kids, but these kids will be in high school and college," Bill Vincent said, "and they're part of the neighborhood, too."

Got a story? Give her a call. Contact Emily McFarlan -- your Readers' Reporter -- at emcfarlan@scn1.com or (847) 888-7773.