David Ward, 4, painted what he saw.
Ward looked in the direction of three boys playing basketball on the court of Hamilton Hill’s Jerry Burrell Park, and dabbed his brush into the red paint on a small palette held by his grandmother, Yolanda Ward, who called herself his assistant.
David swirled the paint into a circle.
`They’re basketballs,` said David, who also drew figures of the boys jumping and running, adding details to his scene.
Ward is one of the nearly 75 community members who participated in the second `Visions on the Hill: A Community Paints` event, aimed at bringing artists of all skill levels and ages together to paint a series of scenes of the park. Artists set up their easels all over the Hamilton Hill neighborhood park, capturing its patrons and landscape with their paintbrushes.
The two-day event ran Friday, July 18, and Saturday, July 19, and was sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts with assistance from the AmeriCorps VISTA Volunteers program.
The event was created last year and is sponsored locally by the Hamilton Hill Arts Center and the Stanford and Albany Street United Methodist Churches.
The Rev. David Heise, of Albany Street United Methodist Church, said he hopes the event will be revived again next year to continue promoting the arts in one of Schenectady’s toughest neighborhoods.
`The program’s intent is to get the kids to do something that’s a positive,` said Heise. `They see so much that’s not a positive.`
Heise said that last year’s program was a success and led to the creation of a new program called the Seniors Painting Workshop. Held on Tuesdays, from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Hamilton Hill Arts Center, the workshop is specifically for artists ages 60 years and older.
Some of their work was featured in an exhibit titled `Six Over Sixty,` and can be seen at The Mossey Group, an advertising agency in downtown Schenectady.
Heise said the arts center will likely exhibit the `Visions of Hamilton Hill` canvases this fall.
Khalil Bey, an art consultant for the Hamilton Hill Arts Center, set up his easel in the corner of the park and painted a scene that included the basketball courts, a few large oak trees and even the Rev. Heise, complete with his identifiable red suspenders.
`It’s more an Impressionist work than anything else,` said Bey, as he shaded the trunk of his tree, mixing brown and white together. `I’m just trying to get everything in there and then tighten it all up.`
Bey said he’s been drawing and painting ever since he was a young child growing up in Philadelphia. He’s worked as a contractor for many years, but art has always been his first love.
`I used to start with just a horse,` said Bey who moved to the Hamilton Hill neighborhood two years ago. `Then I’d add the stage coach and its drivers.
I’d just keep adding on and adding on.`
Bey said he works with students at the arts center to help them appreciate arts from the African American perspective.
Bey said that community projects like `Visions on the Hill` will help young people realize the beauty in their own backyards. He said he remembers that when he first began painting, he would paint his neighbors and friends who often sang doo-wop songs in back alleys.
Bey and others at the Hamilton Hill Arts Center encourage similar pursuits for students, incorporating art in both their summer and after school programs.
`We’re trying to help the kids get some kind of art thing going on,` said Bey, as he finished a brushstroke, rounding out the trunk of the park’s giant oak tree.“
