Copying encouraged at education center

Students create outsized versions of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings.It’s been said Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, but more than a century after his death, his work has staying power. Just ask the students at the Mesa Education Center.

Last summer, teacher Judy Walsh assigned her class -- comprised of 15 adolescents who had been expelled or dropped out of schools in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District -- to replicate Van Gogh’s 1889 painting “The Artist’s Room at Arles.” Walsh cut a calendar page into 2-by-2-centimeter squares and had students copy them in watercolor on larger sheets of paper, then combined all the pieces into the total picture.

As soon as the watercolor copy appeared in the window of Walsh’s room, the neighboring classes grew envious. Now, three Van Gogh classics greet drivers who crawl down Peterson Place, a narrow stretch of road behind Orange Coast College and the education center.

“We have a book on Van Gogh, and we’d been studying him, and I think the kids were interested in his life story,” Walsh said. “This was a person who struggled his whole life, but never gave up doing what he wanted to do.”

Most of the students who fill the three classrooms at the Mesa Education Center know what struggle means. Some attend the four-hour-a-day classes to make up credits they missed at other schools; others have been in trouble at school or with the law.

At the education center, a satellite site of the Orange County Department of Education, they study Monday through Friday for four hours straight with no lunch or physical education period. Most of them plan to return to the Newport-Mesa schools they left behind. The center, however, is an accredited school, and some students remain there through their senior years and then move on to college.

Of the students who worked on the Van Gogh paintings over the summer, many have left the center; only five of the 15 in Walsh’s summer class remain. However, they have left a visual legacy of their time there. Lining the windows of the center, which is tucked away behind a strip mall, are three images well-known to any art devotee: “The Artist’s Room,” “The Road Menders at St. Remy” and “A Sidewalk Café at Night.” A copy of Van Gogh’s most famous work, “The Starry Night,” hangs inside one of the rooms.

Lisseth Martinez, 13, a former Ensign Intermediate and TeWinkle Middle School student, said she had never replicated a painting before but enjoyed learning Van Gogh’s style.

“He was a good artist,” she said. “I got into it.”

Lisseth, who hopes to reenter the eighth grade in Newport-Mesa next quarter, said she wanted to be an artist herself when she graduates -- or possibly a singer. Earlier this year, she and another student also drew a poster commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks that hangs in the window next to the Van Gogh painting.

Art is a major part of life at the Mesa Education Center, where students created masks for Day of the Dead and have other paintings and projects lining the walls. Lisa Locke, a longtime teacher at the center, said crafts were a good complement to studying.

“These are at-risk kids, and so they’re very hands-on,” she said. “They like doing tactile things.”

Although students come and go quickly at the center, those who worked on the Van Gogh project said it offered a chance to bond with classmates.

“Everybody feels welcome here,” said Stacey Ramirez, 16, formerly a student at Estancia High School. “Everybody’s nice, so everybody gets along.”20051108ipm0e7knDOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN / DAILY PILOT(LA)Lisseth Martinez, 13, a student at Mesa Education Center, points out the part of Van Gogh’s “The Artist’s Room at Arles” that she painted. Each student in Judy Walsh’s class at the school worked on a square of the painting, and the pieces were then assembled into the complete work of art.