NRHEG mural embraces spirit of community

After years of discussions about having a mural inside the walls of the New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva Secondary School, it took artist Greg Preslicka just five days to complete it.
Art teacher Cynthia Gail was first approached in 2019, “but I had no interest in doing one,” she said. But last fall, new Superintendent Michael Meihak asked her to look into finding a muralist, and tasked Community Education Director Macy Whiteside with applying for a grant to help pay for it.
Gail found Preslicka, an artist from Savage, who she described last week as “like having Michelangelo in the building. It’s an honor to watch him paint.”
The process officially started March 18, when Preslicka came to NRHEG to speak to Gail’s art students, and get their ideas. By April 6, he had several options for them to choose from; with further input and collaboration with the students, the superintendent and the artist, the final design was ready by April 8.
Three days later, Preslicka was standing in the cafeteria of the secondary school in New Richland, marking his grid on the expanse of wall that would be his canvas.
“I like being in schools,” he said. “It’s kind of like a teaching thing: The kids get to see it happen. I usually talk about it, show them how I go from my rough idea to a sketch, then a tighter drawing with much more detail. Then I show them how the grid works, how it helps me get things on the wall.”
Preslicka has done more than 100 murals, he said, several of them in schools.
“Many times, (the artwork) is about the school and the kids, and the kids’ activities,” he said, “so that’s where I went first with this design. But they pulled me back, and said they really want this to be about the communities. They wanted the school at the center, but said ‘we want to show the towns.’”
But Gail said it was the artist who pulled them back:
“We had all of these ideas, and I gave them to him and he said, ‘Cynthia, you’re scattered in eight directions,’ because I was asking him to do graphic arts and I’m asking him to put this here and that there, and put buildings any old place.”
They settled on the school building in the center, surrounded by a street view from each of the four towns in the consolidated district. A panther, the NRHEG mascot, is above the school, coming out of clouds.
The students asked for the panther, Preslicka said, “as a way to bring in their school pride.”
They also requested each town’s water tower be included, “because I think the kids identify with them,” he said. “They see them and … it’s home.”
The biggest challenge: “It’s a lot of detail, and I want to get it authentic.”
Preslicka used an outdoor paint, latex with acrylic, for a durable result.
Gail brought her classes to the cafeteria each day to watch the creative process and to ask questions.
The first day Preslicka was working on the outlines of the mural, Gail heard preschoolers compare his work to something they could relate to: coloring.
“So I went back and got the drawing, and took it to the office to have them turn it into a coloring page,” she said. Each preschooler got one, and when the mural was complete, they posed in front of it with their own colored version.
It’s not just the littlest students who are fans.
“I see a lot of students asking to come in here and just watch,” Gail said. “They’ll come throughout the day and just stand and ask questions about it.”
Older residents of the four towns have also come to the school, she said, “and they tell stories about what the towns used to be like. One of the buildings shown used to be a theater, so there were lots of stories about that.”
Gail’s sixth- and seventh-grade classes have participated the most; they’ll be around the mural longer than her upperclassmen.
They listened as Preslicka described how he achieved accurate proportions and perspectives.
“When I’m painting a mural and I’m up this close, I can only see a small portion of it at a time,” he said. “So I measure the wall and put (grid) marks on, so when I’m drawing, I have reference points about where something goes.
“Once I start drawing it out, that’s when I start painting in the big colors, the main colors,” Preslicka explained. “Then I start adding details; I start thinking where the light’s coming from, where the shadows are.”
The NRHEG mural, he told them, “is a little different. I’m painting it in sections because it’s actually in sections.”
Mitikie Gushwa, a sixth-grader from Geneva, was in on the brainstorming process.
“I came up with an idea that was close to that,” she said, pointing at the work in progress. “That’s pretty much what I pictured.”
Kendal Habana, a senior at NRHEG who lives in Hartland, was in charge of documenting the entire process, shooting video and editing it for possible use by news stations.
Though she primarily works with clay, the mural is “really something I loved watching him do,” she said. “I’ve been coming down (to the cafeteria) periodically over the week, just to see the different process. I like seeing it come from the blue (grid) lines he starts with.”
Art, Habana said, “has a lot of emotion in it. This is a good thing to walk in and see.”
This activity is made possible in part by a grant from the Prairie Lakes, a regional arts council, from funds appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature’s general fund.
Gail said donations will be accepted to help defray the remainder of the $5,800 project not covered by the grant.