Crystal Burney’s creation for Trum Park Playground is a collaborative effort involving both artists and members of the community.

By Patrick McDonagh

Self-taught muralist Crystal Burney stands at ladder’s length above her next artistic endeavor: Somerville’s Trum Park Playground. Burney’s ladder perch is her preferred method of conceptualizing mural design on the park’s empty cement canvas. The design, bright foundational colors blending behind a circular silhouette tree, will be the product of both artist and community youth over the course of three weeks. The artist’s excitement is palpable as she describes a design process that attracts curious onlookers.

Burney described her creative processes of mural making. “As I am looking at the way the branches form, I will sit there standing at the very top of the ladder. From the top of the ladder I kind of paint it in my head.” The maestro of paint waves a brush high above the cement, orchestrating her design as a primal sense leads her. “I feel like it is almost a ‘cave man’ part of my brain functioning while I am looking at it, “Burney said. “I love it, absolutely love it. It makes me feel very complete. It’s calming and completeness for me.” Burney and the Somerville Arts Council aim to involve the community in the artwork’s creation.

The mural is publicly available to paint again on June 13, 9:30-11:30 a.m. As a grade school art teacher Burney’s familiarity with teaching young children is evident while describing proper brush technique. Community members arrive at the park with children eager to learn and paint. Burney dabs on bright green or blue to designate an area’s color, children brush in the remaining space. The artist eases the nerves of parents, familiar with their children’s potential for creative disasters. “Get as close as you can to the edge; if you go over I outlined it, so I can just trace over the black outline.” She says, and reassures, “If you go outside the lines guys, it is okay.” Burney’s affinity for art stems from a chaotic childhood prone to artistic disaster.

Fondly, she describes her family at work in her art-centric household. “This sounds so mean, my mom is a nut; everything she has done has been self-taught too but she’s… a really super messy artist.” Burney pauses to laugh and imagine the scene. “We all joke around with her when she starts to paint that it is like shrapnel when she’s done. You will find paint all over the ceiling, on the walls, on her, everywhere; it’s all over the place.”

Throughout Burney’s initial career projection of a poet-English teacher, love for art stayed consistent as interest in writing waned. She returned from the Aran Islands of Ireland to pursue her continued passion in visual art; at one time teaching grade school art in nine separate schools.

Immediately after graduating Umass Boston, Burney brought her creative writing degree to the Yeats Society in Ireland. She met Seamus Heaney and others of her literary heroes, published 40 poems, but soon shut the door on any more writing. Burney explains her reasoning for the abrupt change. “Poetry was therapeutic for me. I came back and felt like it was time to focus on art. With literature, my words are the words you understand and you know; I might say the wrong words and they may mean something totally different than what I wanted to say.”

Misinterpretation of her written work was off-putting to further pursuit of the medium. Burney stopped writing and continued painting. Poetry, she felt, was the antithesis of her chaotic childhood. Burney melds her mother’s chaotic art with the allure of poetries parameter.

“When I studied I wasn’t initially going to do poetry, but because it is so succinct, I felt it might get all of the stuff out that I needed to get out. It did.” Teaching youth to paint may not be the most succinct creative outlet, but Burney has learned to work with chaos. Watching her mother paint helped develop an order-driven style; the order she was seeking in poetry that now defines her art. “I guess what I did was I learned how to perfect what I saw going on around me,” she explained. “If I saw what she [Burney’s mother] was doing and it seemed very messy to me, it almost helped me to see some sort of vision in what she was doing. I could understand that her work looks really good to me but it made me crave the ability to make things clean, crisp, and more visually appealing.”

Approved and commissioned by the Somerville City Arts Council, Artist Crystal René Burney is excited by youth participation and the potential for future projects around the city. Gray Sky Designs is her current designer alias. When asked, Burney said she is a happy person. “My Son’s middle name is Gray. I just like the color grey. Gray Sky Designs is what I go under now.”

On Saturday, June 13, from 9:30-11:30 a.m., join community members and local artists in creation of the Trum Park mural that is anything but gray.