A steady rain this morning. Showers continuing this afternoon. High 59F. Winds W at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch..
Tonight
Partly cloudy skies. Low 42F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.
Janet Essley is a painter, muralist, and teaching artist with 20 years’ experience creating collaborative murals with youth and adults. She has led collaborative murals for schools, colleges, community service groups, churches, at-risk youth programs, and environmental education projects.
Essley moved from the east to west coast in 1970 as part of the Forest Workers Cooperatives of the Pacific Northwest. After earning a BFA at the University of Oregon in 1988, there was much valuable learning working with migrant farmworkers in North Carolina and Cambodian refugees in Thailand, before she gained a MA at the California State University in Chico in 1992.
Her work with youth and community murals began 1995 in the alleys of the small rural community of Toppenish, where her husband worked with a migrant farmworker clinic. She gathered local neighborhood youth to paint murals over the graffiti on the garage of her rented house, and then on other buildings in town. This was on-the-job training in how to organize a mural that expressed ideas of the community and allowed untrained participants to be part of art making. This led to a 25-year career as a teaching artist. She also got her first mural commissions, with a local winery and with the Toppenish Mural Society. Her research for that mural on the designs and basketry of the Yakama people led her to Native American stories, and for several years, she was a volunteer guide for Washington State Parks to the pictographs at Horsethief Lake, where those stories explained both natural history of the area, and cultural knowledge of the Yakama People.
A lay naturalist, Essley has an interest in all things out of doors — plants, animals, clouds, stars the ongoing changes coming as a result of climate change. Mural painting in schools has been an opportunity to learn many things on a wide variety of subjects from geology and history, the physic and art analysis. For public murals such as at Spring Creek and Little White Salmon fish hatcheries, expressing the ideas of the facility is the focus of her work. The style of the paintings changes accordingly. The challenge of continual change of theme and style keeps her constantly growing as an artist.
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