EVERETT — What do cave paintings, locomotives and a banana have in common?
They’re all represented as motifs in student art that now adorns the Mariner Park and Ride lot in south Everett.
On Wednesday afternoon, about 40 art students from Mariner High School joined staff and officials from Community Transit to celebrate the unveiling of their work in a permanent installation on the sides of bus shelters.
About 60 students from the school contributed to painting 32 panels illustrated in a transit-oriented themes.
The idea, Community Transit CEO Emmett Heath said, was to preemptively combat graffiti at the newly installed bus shelters.
“The original thinking was to create a sense of community and provide some sense of ownership, and make it less likely to be defaced,” Heath said.
Art has been incorporated into the designs of transit centers in Marysville, Mountlake Terrace and Lake Stevens, so the organization looked to nearby Mariner High School to decorate the new shelters.
The students produced a series of panels built around four broad themes, such as the history of transit and surrealistic representations of buses. The resulting artwork range from a series of panels showing modes of transportation in silhouette, to a more wide-ranging exploration of human history, from prehistoric cave art to the invention of the wheel to modern and futuristic modes of transportation.
And then there are more adventurous interpretations, with panels showing a locomotive in the tentacles of a giant squid, a bus half-turned into liquid (with a Daliesque clock face melting in the background) and a vehicle whose front end is a rabbit and whose rear is a banana.
“It was one of our last-minute ideas,” said Natalie Chavez, 16, a junior who painted the banana half of the surrealist vehicle.
Another junior, Addy Gaona, 17, had painted the leporine nose of the bus, and Chavez needed to complete its transformation into something else. Hence, the banana.
“It sounded like a cool idea,” Chavez said.
Raelee Meige, 18, a graduating senior, painted a boxy 1980s-model bus complete with a Pac-Man character where the route number display would go, as well as a scene of a passenger being taken up into a flying saucer.
“We kind of wanted to represent the history of transit and the way things have changed,” Meige said. “I really like the future and thought it would be fun to do a sci-fi thing.”
The students took about a month and a half to create their panels.
“We were definitely covered in paint for weeks, and the classroom was a mess,” Meige said.
At a short ceremony dedicating the artwork, several of the students spoke to the small crowd, their words occasionally drowned out by passing buses. But they were excited to see their work displayed for the public.
“This mural had a huge impact on our community, and will be seen for many, many years after we’ve all died,” said Crystal Cedeño, a junior at the school.
Meige added: “We’re all part of something bigger and cooler than we’d ever acknowledged.”
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
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