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artists. “See, the dog tail is up there,” English teacher Candy Perry tells artist Betsy Smith,
looking between a color copy of the design and the panel. They decide where the lines
should be, load brushes with dark brown paint and wade in. Melissa Olver, the current art
teacher at Seward's high school, and Gwendolyn Luther, who used to be her student, free-
handedly stipple in a pile of snow next to the cabin. Leslie Simutis is using a roller to fill
in a deep blue sky, which she has first tried out on her fingernails. Brown mustaches begin
to appear on the upper lips of the artists, everything from a Hitler brush cut to a snakey
Snidely Whiplash.
The panels sit on sawhorses and there are plenty of chairs. “We did our first mural on
the floor of the gym crawling around on our knees,” Seward artist and gallery owner Dot
Bardarson says. “We learned a lot with that first one.” Jon is everywhere, daubing paint on
with a paper towel stained brown, drawing in the borders with a T-square and a pencil,
outlining the moon with a large plastic bowl. Jana, Jon's wife, says, “There will be a lot
more murals in the future if it means spending the day with a harem of women. A whole
new vocation for Jon.” Everyone laughs, and someone else says, “Artist's daycare.”
Myself, I think it is also a master class. The artists are watching Jon's every move with
intent eyes, and more than once I hear a long, drawn-out “Ohhhhhh” of discovery. “Every
artist here has her own style,” Gwendolyn says. “That they can let it go enough to make it
look like one work, that is just amazing to me.”
It is very difficult not to leap in and grab up a brush, but the Seward Mural Society has
come a long way from the days of inviting the general public to take a hand. “That was
how we envisioned it at first,” Jennifer says, “but you'd ask for a commitment of two
hours and people would wander off after one.” She was visiting artist at Lompoc's mural-
in-a-day this year and she noticed they only let professional artists participate, and that
they painted smaller murals which let them actually finish in a day. She is now adapting
those ideas to the Seward murals.
By four o'clock that afternoon, the artists are carrying the panels outside to line them
up against the side of the building and seeing how they fit together. The “L” on “Trail”
needs narrowing and lengthening, Jon says, and the blue sky needs to be brought over
farther, from the edge of one panel to the edge of a photograph in another. He sends Jana
out for four cans of spray paint and layers in a shifting, shimmering band of northern
