Painting Our Lives Mural

By Leah Samuelson, Muralist

The students are painting a mural outside on a concrete wall. Their design goes up and over three sets of bright blue metal doors. It’s hard to reach the top of the mural because there are only two short ladders for use, and the bottom of the wall is set up a meter from the ground.

We stand on the one meter tall and one meter deep cement foundation that runs the length of the building. The step down to the ground takes a whole leg. In one bottom corner of the painting is a rectangular landscape of a bad place, in the other corner is a painting of a good place. Behind the middle blue door is the poetry classroom, and it doesn’t have any lights or windows so we leave that door cracked open.

Behind the door on the left is a molasses distillery; behind the right is the Posho maize grinding shop. The street is a rocky dirt path peppered with molasses, maize, and human refuse. Some students stand across the street to survey the mural for a moment. Two and three year olds play there all day; they like to stand near the painting. Our drawing papers have blown away in the wind, along with some cups of paint that had too low levels to hold their ground. The roll of paper towel fell into the bucket of washing water.

The left blue doors fly open so the students adjust their painting positions to accommodate the molasses tar that’s being shoved out the door and plopping onto the street to stay. The students have a bit of time to work on the landscape of the bad place before a slow moving river of tobacco brown liquid oozes along the building foundation we stand on and floods us off.
Leah Samuelson, Muralist in Kenya

The painting of the bad place, with its pile of burning rubbish, polluted sky, and flooded homes comes to life. The corner with the good place is less inundated with tar so we turn to work there. The watoto are throwing fistfuls of maize kernels. We need to move upward soon and fill the floating, six meter horizontal figure with images of our lives and ambitions. Most students say they want to be artists, so maybe the giant can get tattooed with palettes and paintings.

The good place has colorful buildings, colorful cars, people dancing, surfing, and playing football in a park. Several kinds of trees are growing there. When it’s dry, the good place is a playground for the watoto. They slap the water at the beach and stand in a bunched line as car passengers; all twisting an invisible steering wheel. The painting of the good place comes to life.

View the warm-up exercise with Leah, local artists teachers and students in Mathare, or watch below. Warm-ups.