When fairgoers walked into the still exhibit hall of the Cloverdale Citrus Fair, above them hung a large charcoal mural painted by seven students from Geyserville New Tech Academy. The mural, titled “Phoenix Rising,” was created in response to the students’ experiences during and following the Kincade Fire and was made using charcoal harvested from logs that were burnt on the school’s campus during the fire.
“Using this charcoal as well as compressed charcoal and gold leaf, the students drew a mural of phoenixes,” reads the description of the work. “In Greek mythology, at the end of its life the phoenix sets itself on fire and is then reborn from the ashes. The students have thus transformed the traumatic experience of the fire into a vision of renewal, resilience and beauty.”
The seven students that worked on the piece are each represented in the final project as a phoenix: Cayla Ramirez, 16 years old; Maria Camacho, 16; Yuliet Gonzalez, 18; Camila Lopez, 16; Lauren Garcia (skeleton phoenix) 15; Yadira Rico, 17; Ariana Solorzano, 16.
Geyserville New Tech art teacher Yoshi Makino incorporates drawing with charcoal into her instruction every year and saw the burnt logs and lumber on the school grounds as an opportunity to incorporate the remnants of the fall fire into her teaching.
“I thought that this was a perfect opportunity to use this destruction, this material of destruction, in an active transformation into an object of beauty,” Makino said. “Phoenixes are really this pinnacle of regeneration and rebirth, something coming out of destruction of fire.”
The students began harvesting the charcoal in November, Makino said, and then had to go through the process of learning to draw birds and fire, and figuring out what they wanted their individual phoenix to look like.
“It took awhile but I think the effort really paid off,” she said.
Lopez said that when it came to technique, she found the harvested charcoal easier to work with. While it doesn’t provide the same intensity of color, the product was smoother and blended better with less effort.
The mural, which comes in at a whopping 4 feet tall and 17 feet wide was a true collaboration between the students, Makino said.
“I feel like (collaboration) is something that we’re understanding is important to do, but it’s very difficult to do in art,” she said. “I think they really pulled it off and I’m really proud that they were able to do it so well. I think it’s really obvious when you see the piece that they were able to work together.”
While the different components of the mural — namely the phoenixes and fire — flow well together, Lopez said that the process of creating “Phoenix Rising” had its own highs and lows.
The most interesting part of collaborating to create the piece was working through everyone’s style of drawing fire, and making them all work together, Lopez said.
The most difficult part was actually drawing the phoenixes.
“Because the paper was so wide, we had to do the majority of the drawing upside down,” she said.
Makino said that she hopes the mural can be displayed elsewhere, since it’s done at the Citrus Fair. However, she anticipates that finding a location suitable for a piece of its size may be difficult.
While the mural is the largest piece made out of the harvested charcoal, Makino said that she also worked with some of her eighth-grade students to incorporate the charcoal into art projects that they’re doing. Her eighth graders instead used the charcoal to draw on kites, which will be flown at a future time.
While the symbolism of using charcoal from a fire that devastated much of rural north county to create phoenixes is a transformative gesture in and of itself, Makino said that she hopes the project held some aspect of healing for her students.
“I think healing from all the trauma from the fires that we’ve had in the last few years is a slow process and also it keeps getting kind of stymied because we keep having fires,” she said. “I’m hoping that it has helped the healing process, but I think at the very least it’s showing how out of destruction, trauma, there can be transformation and beauty and resilience and growth.”
For Lopez, the project provided a calming outlet following all of the evacuations.
“During the fall fire, my family and I had to evacuate. We went to go stay with other family but unfortunately, they had to evacuate as well. We were always kind of moving around during that time and weren’t really sure if anything had happened to our home. And then when the news that parts of the school grounds were on fire spread it was really stressful,” Lopez said. “Not knowing if I can go back to our house and not knowing if there’s gonna be a school to go back to as well was extremely hard to deal with. I was very grateful to later find out that everything was okay. So, creating this mural was actually quite calming. It was like I was a part of making a hard situation a bit better. Making something that was horrific, beautiful.”
