Chester County artists engage young assistants

On an unusually warm Sunday for November, four very different Chester County artists arrived at their exhibit at West Chester University, bringing with them a large canvas and paint supplies.

They had not come to create art alone.

Accompanying them were nine children, ages 4 to 16, who live in emergency shelters throughout Chester County. Most said they had never worked with paint before, not even in school.

"We don't have a lot of money to give, but we have our time and our skills," said Adrian Martinez, a 61-year-old painter and sculptor who grew up in poverty in Washington.

Martinez and the other artists in the "Paint Paper Clay Wax Wood" exhibit - Rhoda Kahler, Jamie Paxson, and Jeff Schaller - used the project to incorporate their distinct styles into one artwork and to give back to their community.

"We wanted to show the kids our exhibit and then work alongside them so they can think, 'I can do that,' " Martinez said.

"I remember thinking that when I was their age."

When Martinez was about 7, his great-aunt occasionally brought him pencils and paper from her job at the U.S. Government Printing Office. His mother, worried about the neighborhood, would not let Martinez or his three siblings go outside the shelter where they lived, so they would spend hours drawing.

It wasn't until the shelter program took Martinez to the city's museums that he dreamed of becoming an artist.

For years, Martinez donated his portraits and landscapes to fund-raising auctions at the Friends Association, an organization that for more than 150 years has provided emergency shelter and community resources for homeless children in Chester County.

"I always wanted to do something more for these kids, who remind me so much of my younger self," Martinez said. "This mural project is just what I had in mind."

Two days before creating the 28-square-foot mural, Martinez, Kahler, and Paxson had sat down with a few of the children at the Friends Association office - where the piece will hang - to sketch out its design on paper.

Kahler, 37, an artist who fashions mostly ceramic, mosaic, and clay sculptures and who teaches art classes at the West Chester Art Center, explained to the kids that they would be painting a "magic city," where anything could be imagined and created.

While brothers Kenar, 10, and Jaden, 6, penciled cartoon characters on top of buildings, Ruth, a 12-year-old who had taken an art class with Kahler, drew clothing and flowers.

"I don't want a future in art because I only like drawing clothes and fashion," Ruth said. "But I'll be amazed when I come in here and see what I did."

On that Sunday, the artists equipped the children with the wares of their various crafts - a wooden silk-screen printer, paintbrushes, and bits of mosaic and ceramic tile to dip in paint - all to find some application on the sprawling canvas.

Dunking items like doilies, a meat pounder, and plastic letters into Styrofoam plates of paint, the children stamped the base of the mural, creating brightly colored buildings.

Schaller, 40, a wax-based painter, helped Jaden silk-screen birds flying over the buildings, and Martinez collaborated with Rouseline, 12, to add slim lines of white paint on black, adding detail to the faces of a baby, a young boy, and an older man in the top corners, making them pop.

"There's nothing more satisfying than to see a child just happy and feeling creative," said Glenda Brion, the community development coordinator at Friends Association and a longtime friend of Martinez's.

After finishing a few white highlights on each face, Martinez asked Rouseline if she wanted to paint anything else. She unfolded a piece of notebook paper and handed him a sketch of the Puerto Rican flag, which she had penciled the day before.

"I was glad that Rouseline painted [the flag], because it shows her pride for her heritage," Martinez said. "My father came to America from Puerto Rico, so for me to express it in my work is inevitable."

After an artistic process that Martinez described as "controlled chaos," the mural was declared done, and Kenar took the end of a paintbrush and scratched his name into the black paint at the top left corner.

"It feels good to see my name right there, on something this big," he said, "something I can see whenever I want."