June 28, 2009

A (School) World in Miniature
Or how a custodian became an outsider artist without realizing it

By Sam Craig
of The Chronicle

     Custodian Bob Piper gave Colonel Wright Elementary a brand new look over the winter break without telling anyone what he was up to. While kids were celebrating the school’s closure by sledding down hills and chucking snowballs at one another, Piper was hard at work.
     He saw the giant pine tree on the playground that was once just a shady spot in the warmer months and put in a lookout deck and a zipline up in its branches a good 30 feet up. He also put in brand new, state-of-the-art playground equipment.
     The windows that line the sides of the old school building are getting pretty old. Some of the glass has been in place since the glaziers framed it over 80 years ago. Piper installed new, unbreakable glass in every room.
     To finish up, Piper gave the whole school a fresh coat of paint, inside and out, top to bottom. By himself.
     An impossible task for just one man dealing with district budget restrictions? Not really. The Colonel Wright Elementary that Piper worked on is only about eight inches tall and painted on the side of a concrete block that was formed around an empty bucket of kitty litter.
     Piper recreated the entire school, including teachers and students, with paint.      He’s not an artist, he has never painted anything outside of the occasional wall or garage door and he certainly didn’t expect anything from it except to chase away boredom.
     Using very simple — and unconventional — tools, Piper was able to recreate Colonel Wright Elementary and take the school’s staff and student body completely by surprise.
     Over the winter break, snow pounded The Dalles and relegated most residents to the warm glow of the television set, curled up in sweatpants on the sofa. But not all of them.
     If snow was going to keep him at home, Bob Piper at least wanted something to keep him busy.
     Before the break, the school’s principal, Theresa Piper had asked him to get rid of some old, metal lawn ornaments that had been sitting outside the office for years. They’d fallen into disrepair and were bent, damaged and covered with rust.      Sure, they looked like trash, but to Piper, they looked like something to do over the break.
     Poles jutted out from little clumps of concrete. The tops of the poles had two-dimensional, die-cut decorations welded to them. Three of them boasted ducks and one had a beehive. Piper decided to give the condemned duckies and beehive — that also featured a single bee, suspended on a wire) a last-minute reprieve from the scrap pile.
     He took them home and put them in the garage. Piper quickly got to work on the four decorations, first grinding the rust off and getting them back in shape by smacking them with a hammer. He gave them new life with a fresh coat of paint and brought them back to their original glory. The beehive came back from the brink with a new, beige and brown exterior — and the traditional yellow and black for the bee — and the ducks got a coat of brown, green, yellow and orange paint.      Piper made his first creative choice while working on the ducks.
     He stippled the yellow paint onto the ducks’ wings with a sponge and noticed that the concrete bases were much too small to support the animals when they went back into the ground.
     Piper grabbed a few empty cat litter buckets and mixed up some cement. Leaving the old cement in place, he put the metal sculptures in the cement and let it dry.
     After plucking them from the buckets, the now 50-pound ducks and bee were ready to go back to school. But, Piper thought, the gray cement just seemed so drab and uninteresting.
     Grabbing some green paint, Piper brushed it onto the cement bases. But, for some reason, he couldn’t stop there.
     “I said, ‘Well, it’s green, and it kind of matches the ducks,’” Piper says. “So I thought maybe I should put some flowers around it. So I start doing these flowers and I said, ‘You know what? That’d look cool under water.’”
     Piper had seen aquariums in some of the classrooms and thought the teachers might like an aquarium scene on one side of a cement block. He outlined fish, rocks, plants and other things you’d expect to see in an aquarium.
     It was detail work. Piper didn’t have brushes small enough to paint the tiny, intricate scene on his work, so he grabbed a box of toothpicks.
     They worked great. The tool used mostly to dig spinach out of dental work, it turns out, also can be used to paint tiny eyeballs on a miniscule fish.
More ideas came to him.
     “I sort of wanted to make it look more like school,” he says. “So I painted a Wasco County school bus and I thought, ‘Well, this’ll be like a field trip.’ So I put all the kids in rain gear and I got one of the teachers here with his initials. I’ve got kids fighting over a fish. I tried to get every detail in here, as much as I possibly can.”
     He painted a mountain, but it looked kind of bland. A lonely mountain. It needed another field trip. More buses, more kids, more details. Piper drew backpacks on the kids headed up the mountain toward a lodge with several waterfalls in the distance.
     “Thousands of ideas were popping into my head,” Piper says.
     He moved to the next block. The kids he had painted earlier needed a place to come back to after their field trip. He began to sketch.
     He was drawing the interior of a Colonel Wright Elementary classroom. But he gave it some redesigns. New windows, new desks, everything was polished and new. Look out the window and you could see The Dalles all the way to Dallesport. Across the river, a man was playing fetch with a dog, though you wouldn’t know it unless you had a magnifying glass. Piper is still proud of his attention to detail, especially inside the classroom.
     “Things they had on their walls, I got all that,” Piper says. “I even got the clocks in sync.”
     He recreated more and more of Colonel Wright from the playground, other classrooms, the building’s exterior and the stairs in front of the building. Then he began to populate the school he had painted.
     “I started out with stick figures,” Piper says. “Then I started putting clothes and hair and shoes and stuff on everyone. I’m getting better as I go along.”
     Students, hundreds of them. None of them were based on specific kids at the school, but when he added teachers and faculty to the mix, he tried to find a spot for everyone. Piper added the initials of each teacher next to their painted doubles. He was also able to make the world a much simpler place for the custodial crew.
     “Instead of the custodians doing all the work, I’ve got kids out there having fun taking care of it,” Piper says. “I tried to do some detail there, I put ‘CW’ on the rakes so you know where the rakes belong because sometimes schools borrow them from us. And then seeds, I have the kids planting seeds, with a different color on each packet. I tried to get in as much detail as possible.”
     His attention to detail is pretty impressive for someone who never picked up a palette before. There’s even a bit of a running storyline in a couple of panels.
     When he began the project, special education teacher Miranda Toole was just around nine months pregnant. In one panel, Toole looks just about to pop, and in the next, she looks much more comfortable.
     “This is when she was ready to have a baby,” Piper says, pointing to the pregnant depiction of Toole. He turns the cement block to another side. “This is her afterwards, holding a baby in a little carrier.”
     More details come to life in the “back to school night” scene. A student looks out the window with his mom and dad on a dark night. Piper really put his skills to the test here. The scenery spans from the Fred Meyer block of Sixth Street to the west out to The Dalles Bridge and the dam — which also are mirrored on the surface of the Columbia River — to the east and covers everything in between. Scanning the nighttime cityscape of The Dalles, Piper has the father saying, “Wow. Look at that son,” to which the son replies, “I know Dad, Mom. Two McDonalds!” A typical kid response that elicits an, “Oh, great,” from Mom.
     That’s Piper’s sense of humor coming through. He’s been with the school for years and knows everyone. He’s also an observer. Little moments turn into snippets of humor. Like a teacher lassoing a kid who should have known better than to skateboard on campus, the kids who left class to visit the ice cream man and the student caught by a teacher while casting out a line into a no-fishing pond.
     Piper’s world isn’t quite the same as it exists. It’s how he would like to see it.
“I was kind of remodeling a little bit,” he says. “I tried to make it look just a little bit better. I lit up the bridge, that bridge over there doesn’t have lights on it. I lit it up. I’m remodeling everything: the school, the town, everything.”
     When break was up, Piper brought the heavy, cement pieces of art back to the school and into the office on wooden turntables he had made by hand as well. As soon as he walked in, he realized that what he created was more than just a way to stave off boredom.
     “One of the teachers saw them and said, ‘Oh my God. Wow! Just wow!’” Piper said. “To me, I was just having a lot of fun, and I was learning as I go. I think what hit me on what I had kind of done was when Theresa [Piper] said, ‘I don’t think you comprehend the magnitude of the gift that you gave everybody.’ Then it kind of hit me because everybody’s in the picture and it just mesmerized them.”
     The artwork is now prominently displayed in the library where everyone can enjoy it. Kids can turn the heavy blocks with ease by using the turntables. They’ve become a huge hit, especially for something that was previously meant for the dumpster. And though he’s still a little embarrassed by all the attention, Piper is very proud of what he’s achieved.
     At the end of the year, Piper decided to take some time off. While relaxing after a long day of yard work, he got a call from Colonel Wright’s principal.
     “I’m on vacation and Theresa asked if I can come back on the 10th,” Piper says. “I thought maybe they were up to something, but she said they were having a barbecue. I didn’t really have anything planned, so I came back.”
He arrived to see his artwork being carried into the cafeteria. He was a little confused, but thought maybe his first inkling was right. Maybe they were up to something.
     “They’re carrying these heavy things in there and I thought something must be going on, but they’re not saying anything about it,” Piper says. “Then they wheeled this big, old cart in and it’s got a cover over it. Then Theresa said, ‘We have an artist among us,’ and they thanked me and someone said, ‘Here’s what we got you.’”
     The sheet was pulled off the cart and under it was an easel, a painting kit, some 14” by 18” canvasses, two smaller canvasses, a belt with spots to hang all his brushes and, of course, a brand new box of toothpicks.
     “I was so caught off guard, I didn’t even know how to talk to them,” Piper says. “All I could say was, ‘Thank you, it’s awesome, I’m gonna keep busy!’”
     He’ll be waiting until winter to start painting again, but he’s already got a lot of ideas.
     A few weekends ago, while in Northern California, Piper saw an elderly couple, a man in an electric wheelchair and his wife.
     “They had a blanket over them,” he says. “You can see her old wrinkled face.      He’s got his arm around her, just sitting there and they’re by a dumpster. That’s the way they were living. I hate to see stuff like that and that blew me away. I want to paint something like that and maybe put a question on it, like, ‘Why?’”
     He’ll be waiting and thinking about his next project until winter, but becoming an artist wasn’t his main objective. It wasn’t even boredom. It was something much simpler.
     “I was basically just doing it for the ducks,” Piper says. “Just for the ducks.”