Whitley County Community Art Center’s new mural complete

The Whitley County Community Art Center’s new mural, which was created through a collaboration with the University of Kentucky College of Fine Arts, is finally complete.

University of Kentucky digital media and design graduate Colin Glenn designed and painted the mural while still at the university.

“I am extremely blessed to have been given this opportunity,” said Glenn. “It’s been awesome.”

Glenn became involved with the project because of one of his professors, Lee Ann Paynter, a professor in the School of Arts and Visual Studies.

“The project came about through a grant partnership between the University of Kentucky Arts Extension program and the College of Fine Arts to advance the work of arts students and faculty into communities across the state.  The mural will be completed at no cost to the local community, and gives our students the chance to work directly with counties outside of the Lexington area,” said Paynter prior to the project’s completion.

“We are super excited to be able to have a relationship with the university at this level,” said Cortney Moses, the extension agent for fine arts with the Whitley County Cooperative Extension. “We haven’t really had that before through the fine arts extension program, so building those connections and relationships and getting students down here on the ground and interacting with community projects is really hopeful for our programs and resources that we can provide from the university.”

Glenn said the design was based off community responses to questions the Art’s Center shared on social media and through its mailing list. The questions were: “What inspires you to create, what does hope mean to you, and what makes you feel most alive?”

The questions received nearly 100 responses, stated the center in a press release.

“Answers ranged from ‘seeing other people’s creativity’, to ‘being in nature’, to ‘listening to meaningful music and spending time with my friends and family.’ After the survey results were compiled, Colin sorted the answers into dominant themes and categories. He discovered that almost all answers fell into the themes of family, nature, and faith,” said the release.

“From that I started sketching. I thought about the natural cycle of how things are created, born, lives, and dies, and are then created over and over again,” said Glenn. “I thought about how the radial symmetry of the smallest leaf is also reflected in large patterns and elements throughout all of nature and how we have to have faith every day that nature will continue, regardless of anything else we do.”

“I have been progressing slowly as an artist,” said Glenn. Working on projects like the mural in Williamsburg have allowed him to express stronger meanings in his works as well as collaborate with others.

He said using the survey responses to design the work meant he did a lot of thinking.

“I thought that was really interesting to try to make a design off of other people’s answers,” said Glenn. “All of those answers were the community. [They] were Whitley County, and it’s not what Whitley County has that makes it an awesome community, it’s the people that are in it and are involved.”

Glenn said that although the answers were diverse, he could differentiate between specific age groups.

“I started thinking about the spread of information. Generation after generation of people will have kids and they might stay where they are, but if they move away, they will take the information that they learned from their parents and the people they were involved with in their town and then that would influence the community that they then belong to,” said Glenn.

Using nature as his model, the leaves in the mural are a metaphor for the people of Whitley County. People may leave the county, but they take the knowledge and identity of the place with them where ever they go to influence their new community.

“I wanted to get as much of Whitley County as I could in the project,” said Glenn. This is why the four main colors used in the mural come from four native plants in Whitley County.

“It has been super fun getting here, and once I got here, my motivation peaked,” said Glenn.

Glenn said the mural is more of an abstract piece.

Along with Glenn, David Young, who is also a student at UK’s College of Fine Arts, has been working on documenting the project through video.

“The partnership allows for us to give students on campus real-life experience in engaging out in communities with arts organizations,” said Melissa Bond, the arts extension program leader for the Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky. “We thought that documenting the process through video would provide a template for other communities interested in creating artwork in this way.”

Glenn concluded his commitment to the mural project and graduated in May. The Whitley County Extension Arts staff worked with professors, Lee Ann Paynter, to add the last finishing touches to complete the mural.

The mural is located inside the Whitley County Community Art Center in Williamsburg.

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