LEWISTON (WGME) — After the tragic mass shootings in Lewiston, community members are coming together with a paintbrush.
“Since art is my thing and art is healing, this is what I chose to do,” Wicked Illustrations Studio and Gallery Owner Melanie Therrien said.
Therrien is helping that message take flight through having community members help paint a set of wings.
She knew that painting could be a form of therapy.
“I’m just grateful that I get to share the therapeutic process of art with the community,” Therrien said.
More than 100 community members helped paint the wings.
“Art can be incredibly therapeutic and artists here in the city creating art will certainly be a part of that healing process,” Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline said.
The wings go up in the spring in the “Wicked Wings” alley on Lisbon Street.
There’s already other sets of wings there.
“They were just for fun. This is for healing,” Therrien said.
Connors Elementary School Art Teacher Kelsey Boucher is also using art to help her students.
“It’s a really powerful way to get your feelings out without having to feel like you have the right and wrong grammar and right or wrong sentences or words that you are using,” Boucher said.
Boucher says students have created pieces that focus on their worries and how they can deal with them.
“We have a huge population of students who don’t speak English as their first language, and so I think that art is its own language, and so I think a lot of what we are able to do in the art classroom and just with art in general. It can speak to everybody, no matter what language you speak, no matter what your abilities are,” Boucher said.
Therrien can say the same.
“You can benefit from the creative process, the therapeutic process of creation. And then that continues once the work is finished, and you can share it with the community because public art is free to everybody. Anybody can go see it,” Therrien said.
Therrien says people are still welcome to come to her studio and help paint.