Ceiling art: Central Academy students paint with emotion

Students at Cape Girardeau Central Academy are learning to cope with emotional struggles and hardships through spray paint, acrylic finger paint and unique brush strokes — some made with toothbrushes — while using the facility’s ceiling tiles as a canvas.

Art instructor and retired Cape Girardeau Central High School football coach Lawrence Brookins said he wants each of his art students to “leave a little bit of themselves behind in that ceiling.” More than 30 interspersed tiles will be painted.

“We all have our own types of baggage. ... They’ve been given a chance to express themselves as best they can up to this point in their lives,” Brookins said of the project, titled “It Ain’t Heavy, It’s My Baggage.”

He said the activity provides him a chance to talk with the students about color theories, color combination and how colors have the ability to express moods.

Senior Mecca Cooper was outlining portions of her near-finished 48-inch-by-20-inch painting with a black Sharpie on Tuesday. One side of the tile features a bright blue background with a red graduation cap, a microphone, music notes, cosmetology credentials and a clenched fist. The other side is a bit darker, depicting a caged heart with the words “DAMAGED,” “Broken” and “Pain” floating around it.

Art teacher Lawrence Brookins Jr., left, speaks to Central Academy senior Julius Hayward about an "It Ain't Heavy, It's My Baggage" project Tuesday at Central Academy in Cape Girardeau. The artwork, painted on ceiling tiles, is to be displayed on the school's ceiling.Jacob Wiegand

“I like music, I like to sing, and I want to graduate,” she said. “This fist represents being black and coming up out of how I grew up.” The other side of the canvas, Cooper said, represents everything that prevented her from reaching her goals. “When I was a freshman, I was really worried about other things, than myself.”

But the red and blue caged heart, Cooper said of her untitled creation, is protecting her from “all these other things that hurt me before.”

Cooper said she mixed her own colors and applied the acrylic paints with a toothbrush.

“I didn’t want to get too in-depth, but I just felt like this is what I wanted to do,” she said of her three-week project.

Mimicking Cooper’s split-canvas theme, junior Amari Green was finalizing his colorful “good side” versus “bad side” painting nearby, “Mixed Personalities.” And it all started from a sketch, he said.

Green said he’s a good person who does great things, pointing to the red-winged masked figure, “but sometimes I be in a mood, and that’s where this comes in handy. That’s where you don’t want to be around me.”

With a spray-painted background, Green infused the opposite side with a multicolored stained-glass appearance, similar to what’s found in cathedrals.

“Everybody’s got a piece of their soul in this project,” Green said. “There’s, frankly, no way to do this without it having a connection to you.”

Brookins said the students may not admit it, “but they take it serious and really put a lot of themselves into it.”

“Our goal is for these things to be up in that ceiling until this building falls down,” he said.

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