Central City Kids Enlarge Their Imaginations on Extra Large Murals--With Some Help From a Friend

Jonathan Borofsky may be a big name in art circles, but to the Central City and Skid Row children who painted murals with him at the Inner City Arts center last week, he was just a fun guy who let them make up their own animals and paint with pretty colors.

“It’s lots of fun,” said 11-year-old Lidia Sevilla, known as one of the best English speakers in her class of Latino children, many of whom are considered homeless. “We get to put on nice, shiny colors . . . I drew a shell of a turtle, with a face of a girl, and eyes like an alien.”

Lidia and about 90 other third and fourth-grade students from the nearby Ninth Street School spent two days with Borofsky, who oversaw the production of three 9x20-foot murals depicting animals from the children’s imaginations. On the first day, the children drew their animals onto acetate transparencies, which Borofsky then arranged and projected onto the mural paper. On the second day, they painted their enlarged animals with temperas.

The murals--one each produced by three separate classes of kids--will hang at the school, at 1202 E. Olympic Blvd., for the next month or so. After that, Inner-City Arts Director Bob Bates hopes to be able to show them at some local museums or galleries.

“It’s just a little bit of magic that they can be exposed to,” said Borofsky, who recently completed the much talked about “Ballerina Clown” sculpture in Venice. “To see how their own drawings can be turned into a mural is exciting for them.”

Borofsky, an advisory board member of Inner-City Arts, which has operated as an arts facility for Skid Row-area children for nearly a year, said he felt that being exposed to such “magic” was important to children so as not to stifle their creativity at an early age.

“Here, they’re basically let free to create as they want,” he said. “So much of our lives we’re told how we should be and act, so it’s nice to stimulate that free activity. That’s sort of of how I work--what I do is kind of just slopping the paint around freely--sometimes it’s just fun to get down there and do it.”

Noted Borofsky, whose smile during the project indicated that he was having almost as much fun as the kids: “I’ve done murals with 20-year-olds in the colleges, and the 9-year-olds here did just as well as the 20-year-olds.”