St. Charles community comes together to add splash of color to street in city's downtown

Claire Cordina loves to express her creativity.

The 7-year-old St. Charles resident and her brother, Evan, 4, were using paint rollers on July 30 to add a splash of color to the intersection of Riverside Avenue and Walnut Street in downtown St. Charles as part of a community art project.

Her mother, Jacquelyn Cordina, said Claire loves to paint.

“She's very artsy-craftsy,” she said. “She's having lots of fun.”

Claire smiled as she held the paint roller in her hand.

“Painting is fun to do,” she said.

Cordina and her husband, Jeff, decided to have their children participate in the project.

“I thought this would be something unique and fun to do,” she said.

The St. Charles Arts Council organized the Paint The Riverside community street painting project.

“It's going great,” St. Charles Arts Council Executive Director Kathryn Hill said. “The kids were here at 9 a.m. and are having a ball.”

The community street painting project follows last year's community art project in which a fabric art piece was draped over the southeast wall of the St. Charles Municipal Building. The fabric art pieces that comprised the project - called “Our City Sunshine” - were donated and sewn together by community members. Brooklyn, New York-based artist Amanda Browder, known for her large-scale fabric installations, oversaw that project.

EarthPaint, a Wood Dale nonprofit organization, supplied the paint for the Paint The Riverside project. EarthPaint recycles latex paint.

“Recycled paint covers a lot better than brand-new paint off the shelf,” EarthPaint founder Chris McCarthy said. “So we really didn't require as much as we typically would need because our paint is thicker once it's filtered.”

EarthPaint has a recycling location at Do it Best St. Charles Hardware store.

“People can bring all the paint that they want there while the store is open,” McCarthy said.

EarthPaint is working on opening a paint store in St. Charles, he said.

McCarthy was happy to be part of the project.

“I am so proud to be a part of something like this,” McCarthy said. “EarthPaint is going on 10 years old, and this is the first time we've done a project like this. So it's a really good start to our next 10 years of immersing ourselves in communities and letting people know that an organization like ours exists.”

In conjunction with the Paint The Riverside project, Darcy Tatlock, middle school librarian at the St. Charles Public Library, was overseeing a sidewalk painting project next to the library.

“I was really excited to find out that we were using recycled paint for the project,” Tatlock said. “I am very artistic, so this is right up my alley.”