Beautiful People Everywhere
September 2021
Acrylic Painting on Wood Panel
4 ft. by 8 ft.
Exhibiting Outdoors in Escondido, California
In the alley south of Grand Avenue between Broadway and Maple
Esco Alley Art, October 9th
Foreground – Beautiful, colorful characters everywhere reflect the vast differences of people from around the world. The bodies have heads of flowers from different countries and in a variety of body sizes, shapes, and skin tones. These different characters represent acceptance of all.
Midground – Hands united from all over the world, inspiring love and peace. The land and hills with fountains represent a local Escondido feature of the town.
Background – Distant clouds with faces showing judgement of sadness and happiness for accepted people.
Community Artist
This mural was designed and painted by multiple artists.
A casting call by teacher David Mackintosh to former highly talented students of all ages from the Escondido school district. Art directed by mural artist Spramani Elaun. The key feature of Spramani’s murals is to teach young artists how murals are conceptually created by collaboration, through phases of planning, while educating students on acrylic painting.
Artists:
Spramani Elaun
David Mackintosh
Lluvia Arriola
Victor Arriola
Giselle Gonzalez
Darlene Lorenzo
Tania Martinez
Adrian Olguin
Art Director Notes
Collaborative community murals take longer to plan because we are combining different artist ideas that the whole group needs to accept. Generally, we bring people together that usually don’t know each other very well. We ask them to become vulnerable and share their sketches, ideas, and opinions amongst a group. My role, along with being creative, is to make every person feel that their ideas are as important as anyone else’s in the group. It takes a lot of confidence for a young artist to share their work among strangers.
In the first phase of the project, I teach students all about murals and what they stand for. Then, we discuss hot topics in the community and what message we would like to send out to the community. With the recent George Floyd tragic death, I felt the topic all students had on their minds was the message of accepting each other’s cultures and backgrounds. The group who curated this mural was predominantly Hispanic.
In our second phase of brainstorming, students shared some great, strong visuals. The biggest struggle was fitting everyone’s ideas on the mural. I decided each scene should be on the mural!
With having to decide where things would be laid out, I decided to highlight one of the core lessons to mural designs: foreground, middleground, and background. I decided the different images would be laid out in three areas, which would teach this concept well, incorporating all the students’ ideas in some aspect.
One of the great things about Mr. Mackintosh’s artist casting call was that he recalled all the students exhibiting creative talents in his classroom with extraordinary art skills. He was right that these students brought some very creative ideas to the mural.
