Cloverdale students deck the walls with amazing art

Cloverdale Elementary School's Art Club members are working on their own masterpieces. Over the past five years, Art Club members have produced 41 replicas of masterworks by some of the most famous painters in history on the hallway walls of Cloverdale School in Carol Stream.

Art teacher and original oil painter Pamela Hart penciled the outlines of the works on the wall and provided students with full-color copies of the paintings, along with basic yellow, red, blue, black, and white paints. She asked them to try their best in reproducing the artworks, encouraging them that there was nothing they could do that could not be fixed, and guiding them to experiment and match the original artists' colors from the simple pallets they had been provided.

"They're fourth- and fifth-graders, and I'm asking them to recreate masterpieces," Hart said. "Frankly, they've done an amazing job."

Each of the works was originally produced by an artist that Cloverdale students learn about as part of their art curriculum. Now when students are learning about André Derain, they can go down the hallway and look at Art Club member Alyssa Laherty's version of his Fishing Boats. When they find out about Albrecht Dürer, they will recognize Sam O'Connell's rendition of "The Rhinoceros," and when they learn about Paul Cezanne, Mrs. Hart will take them to see classmate Miguel Quijano's piece.

With Hart providing some finishing touches, and she and other staff members adding painted frames to the pieces, Cloverdale's hallways look more like those of the Art Institute of Chicago than a typical elementary school.