Please Do Touch! 

Artist TJ Smith applied a protective clear coat over a mural he’s been working on for almost an entire year. The clear coat protects the painting underneath because if everything goes as planned, it's going to be touched often.  

The 40-foot wide mural covers most of one wall in the library and is painted in bold colors that invite your attention. The colors and shapes draw inspiration from the grand valley surrounding Clifton: sandstone orange, sagebrush green and river blue form images of mesas, desert foliage, and a long river flowing through. 

While working, Smith said, “The main objective of this mural is to act as an SEL or a social-emotional learning tool … the way that it's doing that function is playing upon the senses.” 

The mural isn’t just a pretty picture to look at. On the left side of the mural, you can find a real cottonwood tree trunk secured to the wall and integrated into the scene. It is meant to be touched, climbed on and hugged. At the base of the trunk is a real piece of sandstone. There are some smaller rocks mounted to the wall for climbing on. Sections of the painting are textured and rough to the touch. Slivers of metal resembling the caps of waves in the river feel cold, mimicking the coolness of water.  

“You have this natural scene that is vast and reminiscent of Grand Junction. [It] has middle ground, foreground, and background elements that kind of draws the eye in and allows it to really just…find things and explore the visual narrative that's happening,” said Smith. 

The community invests 

Much of Clifton was built during an oil and gas boom in the early 1980s and most of the mortgages taken out were counting on Exxon and other companies to continue to thrive. They didn’t — and the new cul-de-sacs went vacant literally overnight. Clifton has been wounded ever since, and the schools are where you see some of the worst effects.  

This is why it was so noteworthy in 2020 when a group of businesses aided by the D51 Foundation pulled together resources to remodel the threadbare library of Clifton Elementary. They raised over $60,000 to re-carpet, re-paint and build new shelving. They outfitted the library with new technology for modern learners. They made the library the inspiring place it is intended to be, and many of the staff and leadership of the businesses actually rolled up their sleeves and did the work of renovation themselves.  

But, something was missing 

The investment of money and time was truly felt and appreciated.  

“The library had been renovated, redone and kids loved it!” said Ciera Colson, the family center coordinator at Clifton Elementary. “We had a ribbon-cutting ceremony which was really exciting. After that our principal and our assistant principal noticed that there is just something missing … we got all the new things and we got the updated space, but we needed something where the kids wanted to be. It was a beautiful space, but it was just kind of lacking some color and life.” 

Around this time, recognizing the emotional fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic on students, the D51 Foundation was offering grants for adding elements of SEL (Social-Emotional Learning) into the school environment.  

Colson recalled, “We told the D51 Foundation that we were going to create a peace corner for the library and kind of make it as an interactive space for kids who are, you know, having trouble during that precious learning time.” 

The grant was approved and when the thought of an interactive wall mural was suggested, Colson knew just the right person for the job: TJ Smith.  

Smith said, “When I was approached to create this mural … they kind of had a basic idea of it being a therapy or social-emotional tool. But we didn't really know exactly what that was.” 

Everyone involved in the initial idea phase remembers the time fondly. 

“It was a lot of really fun brainstorming to sit in the library with principals and the librarian and the guidance counselor and we fell upon nature and we fell upon this idea that … it's as if you're hiking and you come to that spot that has a really great view and good shade and there's maybe water running,” Smith recalled.  

Smith had his camera ready to photograph the finished product. About 12 kids had been invited to see the reveal and to finally touch it as it was intended. And, that’s just what they did. They climbed on the rock and jumped off. They grabbed the bark of the tree. They explored a rug that looks like a continuation of the grass on the wall. They counted all the ants they saw. Some of them just chilled. They interacted with the mural, in the ways its creators hoped.  

The benefits you don’t see 

There’s always the main goal, and then there’s the peripheral magic that happens. Smith was a constant presence over the course of a year for these kids. When he said he’d be back, he was. He was an example of taking on a seemingly huge task, breaking it into all its smaller parts and then diligently plodding along until completion. 

Smith said, “[It] was really cool to paint this with the children, or at least with them watching, because I never saw a mural being painted where I was in school. I mean, I barely saw that in my adult life. It's certainly something that usually people don't get to see the process of, especially at a young age.”  

“They were seeing him all the time on a weekly basis, and he was always interacting with the kids and [they were] wondering what he was doing and showing the kids that, you know you don't always have to do the social standard of going to college or maybe doing something that you don't want to do … that you can be really creative in what you do with your life,” said Colson. 

Colson added, “And I think kids really appreciated that. And there were kids who had even said that, oh, wow! I can be an artist when I grow up and it's like, yes, you can. You can be whatever you want to be. And I think TJ was just a really good example of that.” 

Cullen Purser is a multimedia journalist with Rocky Mountain PBS based out of Fruita.You can reach him at cullenpurser@rmpbs.org.