By Adam Wenkoff ’18

There is a new mural in the music hallway at Staples, and it has been garnering a lot of attention throughout the school.

The mural can be found next to the music department’s offices, and it was hung this past summer. The mural was requested by orchestra teacher Adele Valovich, who wanted the mural to have a surreal, Dali-inspired theme with a bright, Peter Max-like color scheme. The eye-catching painting consists of more than 15 colors and contains several musical instruments. It captures a scene of nature blended with the music world, with birds made out of treble clefs and a bushel coming out of a French horn.

According to mural painting teacher Tracy Wright, all of the murals at Staples were designed by students. It was designed by Wright’s mural painting class two years ago, but it took only one semester to paint. “This mural was almost completed by the original class. There were some challenging aspects that took some time and expertise from some advanced painting students before it could be hung in its place,” Wright said.

Each of Wright’s mural painting classes have had their own projects to work on every semester. This semester’s class is currently working on an emoji-themed mural that will go up in the cafeteria once it is completed. “This emoji mural has been our main focus this semester. We’ve been working really hard on it and I can’t wait to see it go up once the semester is over,” Noah Engelke ’20, a contributor to the project, said.

Some students would like to see murals spread to the rest of Staples.

Eddie Kiev ’20, another student currently taking mural painting, noted that “art and English go really well together. In the future I would like to see classes paint a mural that would go up in the English department.”

Wright agrees, saying, “We would love to have more murals in the school. Unfortunately, since there has been only one mural class per year for the last several years, it’s hard for us to make a lot of paintings. I think that a lot of people have concerns that this class is for advanced artists, but really, no experience at all is necessary. I would encourage anyone who is interested in design and painting to try out mural painting.”