On one of the final days of the school year, Warwick Community School students and their families walked into the building to find a massive surprise. In place of a plain wall, a vibrant mural — which the students spent an entire semester painting — now hung proudly below the lobby ceiling.
Inside her home in Orange, Susan Marshall, the “Artist in Residence” who guided the students through painting the mural, flicked through photographs of the big reveal. The images captured the expressions of students and teachers as they took in the mural in its permanent spot: toothy smiles, wide, shocked eyes and hands over their hearts.
“It was amazing to see all of it and all of the work that the students did together,” rising sixth grader Hannah Mankowsky said.
For Mankowsky, Friday afternoons after second recess meant time with Marshall to learn more about painting, one of her favorite hobbies.
“I really like all the textures you can do with it,” Mankowsky said, “and how so many colors can blend together to make one beautiful piece of art.”
Artist Susan Marshall of Orange helps Warwick Community School students paint the school’s new permanent mural. CAROLE LEARNED-MILLER / Courtesy 
The installation of the new permanent mural at Warwick Community School. CAROLE LEARNED-MILLER / Courtesy 
Artist Susan Marshall of Orange paints with Warwick Community School students. CAROLE LEARNED-MILLER / Courtesy
The 36-foot-long mural follows the four seasons of Warwick’s flora and fauna, from the fish and beavers of spring to the sunflowers of summer, the orange leaves of autumn and the deer of winter. In the mural’s coldest corner, a student zips through the snow on a cafeteria chair — a detail Marshall plucked from a story the students shared about a classmate’s winter sledding adventure outside the school.
The overall idea grew from the students’ enthusiasm for otters, the school’s gardens and other aspects of nature, which are pillar of the school’s curriculum.
“Everybody kept saying to me, ‘What did [the students] do on it?’” Marshall said. “They did everything.”
As the students colored and shaded the features Marshall outlined, she taught them how to mix colors, how to get different effects from different brushes and the signature techniques of several famous artists. Each Friday, Marshall pinned a photograph of a master artist and a few prints of their work onto a clothesline in the cafeteria before sharing the painter’s history and impact.
Traces of these art history lessons blend seamlessly into the mural’s seasonal theme. Claude Monet’s water lilies float on the spring water, Joan Miró’s hearts dangle from the branches and Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” swirls above the snow, which happens to be Mankowsky’s favorite part of the project.
“They went completely berserk over ‘Starry Night,'” Marshall chuckled.
While designing costumes and wedding dresses in New Jersey, Marshall pursued decorative painting “on the side.” As the load of her painting gigs grew in volume and scale, she started her own business, Custom Design Interiors, in 1990, while raising her three children.
With an art and a technical theater degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst to her name, Marshall saw murals as a natural merging of the two specialties.
“Technical theater is all about big and making an impression from far away, which is what [murals] basically are,” Marshall said.
Although she moved back to Orange in 2004 — where she and her late husband had lived in the 1970s — and closed the business, she remained an active artist. She eventually painted two murals inside the Fisher Hill Elementary School in Orange.
While Marshall makes the ultimate design choices and picks up the brushes, she describes the creative process as collaborative.
“You have to be able to hear people to paint whatever they’re bringing to you,” She said. “I would say to them, ‘Can I have 10, 15 minutes in the room? Can I just sit here?’”
Travel photos, room colors and other hints of “what makes their hearts happy” often inspire her murals, but one theme continues to crop up.
“Mostly, it was always about bringing the outside in,” Marshall said, wild flowers peeking out from every window in her home. “It brings a world into an indoor place, and you’re transported by it.”
The seasonal arc of the Warwick Community School mural calls back to a lesson Marshall learned from her mentor at UMass Amherst.
“He always said that when you look at a painting, you should be able to enter it and find a way out of it,” Marshall recalled. “It shouldn’t be a vignette, it shouldn’t be like a box.”
The same professor once ran one of Marshall’s paintings under a running faucet to teach her to paint with her “free spirit” rather than just relying on technique.
“He pulled it out and it was gorgeous because it blurred everything,” Marshall said.
Marshall and her assistant at Custom Design Interiors called theses moments “happy accidents.” At Warwick Community School, she passed that lesson on, teaching the students that mistakes can become artistic opportunities rather than roadblocks, and that a little white paint goes a long way.
“Every different Artist in Residence who comes shares something about what inspires their work, and then students have a chance to try the style of that particular artist,” explained Warwick Community School Superintendent Carole Learned-Miller. “Students who really love the arts can actually meet folks who have professions within the arts.”
As the first semester-long, permanent art installation at the school, Learned-Miller hopes the students gain insight from the hard work behind the finished piece.
“I’m hoping the lessons they learned about being really intentional and planning and going through a really careful, long-term process could be something that translates to other things they do like a piece of writing,” the superintendent said. “You can over time put together something that’s really masterful.”
