Lawton brothers share heart for art with SCORE Academy students

Inside the Great Plains Technology Center’s SCORE Academy Friday, the buzz of conversations called like a siren to the spot in the student lounge where Darry and Terry Shaw offered tips to budding mural artists.

On the wall, the image of a buffalo under an Oklahoma sky was taking shape as student groups of three brushed strokes of paint. Clad in their trademark paint-speckled attire, the Shaw brothers shared insights into painting colors inside the pencil sketched grid pattern creating the image.

For this one, inside the grid are stenciled lines and inside those lines, inspiration takes form. There’s room for error and problem solving, said Terry Shaw.

“It’s just paint, “ he said, “anything can be fixed.”

The painting followed a short teaching session that included photos of the dozens of murals the Shaw brothers have created throughout Southwest Oklahoma. Darry Shaw answered questions from the students about their creative process and how much they charge per mural.

“I charge by the piece,” he said. “We can do them real fast, usually within a day to a day-and-a-half.”

One students referenced the brothers’ “Tombstone” mural on East Gore Boulevard near Terry Shaw’s home. Some pieces are simply made through passion and a sense of fun.

“We did that one ourselves,” he said, “nobody paid us to do it.”

Stacey Pereles, SCORE Science Instructor, said the Shaw brothers were there as part of the Life Skills Course held every Friday. Recently, Check Wrecker provided lessons on how to change tires and other basic automotive services for the kids.

Established in 1995, the SCORE (School of Career Opportunities and Real Education) Academy is designed to help reconnect students between the ages of 16 to 20 to completing a high school education as a dropout credit recovery/alternative education program that incorporates traditional academic education with elective courses designed to help students prepare for the “real world.”

Pereles said it was a great fit bringing the Shaw brothers in, as they’ve made a career out of creating art commercially and for themselves.

“I think the kids really, really enjoy bringing art into it,” she said. “We don’t have enough art here.”

At the end of the first session, Pereles said the group of 26 “did a good job” in starting the mural.

“I’ll probably let them out for lunch,” she said, joking.

Pereles said the Shaw brothers told her they feel it’s important to give back to their hometown of Lawton and are happy and thrilled to motivate and inspire the youth.

“They really did a great service today for the good of promoting art and working with our future,” she said.

Terry Shaw said the students were taking what was taught to them and applying it pretty well for most of their first time. What’s learned can be taken home and applied if they want to create a mural in their own rooms, for example.

Two of those students, Ryan Landers and Desire’e Webster, watched their fellow student artists applying their brushstrokes to the developing image of a buffalo. They also were using colored pencils to draw and color some creations of their own on paper.

Webster, a senior at Lawton High School, said art is among their passions. Multi-mediums are among their interests, from working with Photoshop to tackling watercolor painting.

Learning from the Shaw brothers, after seeing on a daily basis their dozens of murals that decorate Lawton, Webster is in awe of their productivity.

“It’s weird they’re able to get one done in one or two days, if I were to do something like this it would take at least a week,” they said. “I usually do a small project; I feel like a mural would be fun to do.”

Terry Shaw said at the moment, they’re putting together plans for between 10 to 15 new murals to be painted in the coming year.

Landers, an Eisenhower High School junior, said his future includes plans to get into 3-D animations. Less confident in his practical artistic abilities, he admitted, he didn’t want to “mess up” the mural. He was impressed with how the Shaw brothers shared how they plan and process a mural before taking paint to wall.

“I think this was a really good thing to do,” he said before crediting the SCORE program. “This school is great; it’s not every day you get to do a project like this.”