School ceiling lights up with student art

Kayla Johnson and Marlena Olson

Two teenage Colfax student artists spent the past month and a half painting 14 ceiling tiles, each a reflection of a school program.

Their work now spreads across the ceiling outside the school art room on the high school’s second floor.

Seniors Kayla Johnson and Marlena Olson started working on the panels in January, carefully wiping the colors of the rainbow on the dark side of some extra ceiling tiles.

“We wanted to leave our mark on the school somehow,” said Olson, 17. Together, the two researched the logos and interpretive murals behind programs like Future Problem Solvers, Students Against Destructive Decisions, National Honor Society, sports and other district programs.

Today, a toothy gray bulldog is forcing its way out of the ceiling. A genie lamp, representative of the Knowledge Bowl program, blows a trail of purple smoke across another tile. Cross country runners zig zag their way down a path through the Palouse.

Sun-lit crests of wheat hills line several tiles.

“As small a school district as we are, someone has done something on that ceiling,” said Cheryl Lothspeich, art teacher at the high school who guided her two advanced students through the project.

The girls said they worked hard to make the art contiguous between tiles instead of confining creations to tile by tile.

“All we’ve done is taken tiles, turned them over, painted them and put them on the ceiling,” said Lothspeich.

The two girls painted the dark side of the tiles. Then, the ceiling tiles out in the hallway were removed and the new tiles were put in place.

Johnson, 18, said her favorite part was designing the bulldog as it was their first painting and it took the longest.

“Just because it’s so fierce- it’s the first thing we did. It was fun to do,” Johnson said.

Another art class of Lothspeich’s designed a series of paintings reflecting the work of a famous artist. During an art tour, elementary students will tour the paintings, which are set up in the library, and listen to presentations by the older students on their artist.