Making murals with Zara Fina Stasi - The one where we painted on the walls of The Painting School...

Let me start by saying that I cold called Zara Fina Stasi, the founder of Good for the Bees. , after seeing her mural on my daily dog walk. Blue and I often passed by a beautiful mural that she had painted on the construction fencing surrounding Christ Church Cobble Hill and I loved her palette and the blown up scale of the natural elements.

Reverend Mark (who so graciously let me teach out of the church’s awesome big room before I got the current storefront) told me that Zara had recruited community members to both help out on the painting and to bring in their old, discarded paint to use. I loved both the art and the community building behind it.

Then we moved on to a collaborative piece that Zara had blocked out with painter’s tape. We each took a square or two, not worrying about what kind of art was next to our art, instead we trusted the process that would allow our individual artworks to become a single piece of art in the end. Which is exactly what happened. Check out the big reveal below!

Zara was immediately into the idea of a mural painting workshop and a few weeks later we were set up for a small group of creative people to learn how to paint murals and bring smaller designs to life on a larger scale. Zara started with a short talk on the history of murals downstairs before we moved upstairs to start painting on our own section of wall space.

In our individual squares we did multiple styles of the same inspiration, noticing the shifts that happened with each version based on Zara’s guidance and feedback.

We learned about brushes and technique but also about inspiration, scale and palette. The people who are interested in working on mural projects with the city or other organizations were able to talk to Zara about RFPs and how to work with municipalities.

Thank you, Zara and all of the participants. It was a great afternoon and we got to keep that cool artwork on the wall.