Bourque shares her art & inspiration

Joan Bourque is an art teacher at South Verde High School. Bourque has been working at the school for around three years, and has called Arizona home for around two decades. Before coming here, she spent four years in New York City, and more than a decade on the island of Saba in the Caribbean, where she worked as a scuba instructor.
Zack Garcia/Larson Newspapers

Outside South Verde High School off of Main Street in Camp Verde, students take shifts painting colorful images into fake windows they’ve created on an outside wall.

The students are doing their own work, but Joan Bourque watches on.

Bourque is an art teacher at the school and has been helping students express themselves artistically at other schools from time to time as well.

“I asked what they wanted to tell their community about themselves,” Bourque said. “They wanted to say we’re not who you think we are, we want to tell them who we are.”

An alternative to the regular high school, South Verde High School has often been the subject of misconceptions.

There was already a window on the wall, so the art students decided to paint some more “windows” to give a glimpse into what was going on inside the school.

The new windows are a form of trompe l’oeil, French for “deceive the eye.”

Surfaces are painted in such a way to give the impression that what’s depicted exists in three dimensions.

To read the full story, see the Wednesday, Oct. 8, edition of The Camp Verde Journal.

Mark Lineberger

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