Painter adds color to Moses Lake museum

MOSES LAKE — Give Erika Kovalenko a blank wall, and all she sees is a canvas just dying to be painted on.

“This is our classroom area and we do all type of stuff here as a space,” said Kovalenko, dressed in a T-shirt and white overalls splattered with paint. “It was just kind of boring blank walls; it was ready for something fresh in here.”

“I’ve had it in my heart to do a mural for quite a while, and it’s a great wall space for it,” she added.

The something fresh that Kovalenko, the artistic director of the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center, is working on is a giant mural of a Columbian mammoth, the same animal whose scrap metal skeleton adorns the inside of the museum.

And the place is the classroom in the museum itself, which has been a sparse, white and somewhat antiseptic space since it was created a few years ago.

Kovalenko, 31, who has been with the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center since early 2019, said painting the 16-foot-tall mural on the classroom’s northwest wall both keeps her busy while the art museum is closed and will give visitors to the museum something new to see when the city allows it to reopen.

“I’ve done a lot of murals, but not for the city, and we were looking for something to liven up the space,” she said.

The mammoth, painted in a latex splash of grays, reds and creams, is surrounded by big leaves in a number of colors. As of Monday, Kovalenko said, she’d been working on the mural for three days. She started with a rough sketch, which sits on the floor next to a tall ladder, and then sketched it out, freehand in pencil, on the wall.

After that, she starts applying the color.

“We knew we wanted a lot of color; this classroom is asking for color and more movement,” Kovalenko said.

The Columbian mammoth is the less-hairy and less-known cousin of the giant woolly mammoth, and last walked the ground of North America around 12,000 years ago. Kovalenko said a fully-grown adult stood around 13 feet tall at the shoulders, making the smaller subject in her painting “actually a baby.”

Still, with the animal’s long trunk and very long tusks, Kovalenko said she needed the entire wall for her mural.

“It’s neat to be able to see things visually for me,” she said.

Even though she’s not finished with this mural, Kovalenko said she can’t help looking at the rest of the classroom and see more places to paint.

“This space is really cool,” she said. “This classroom hasn’t been used enough and so we’re excited. I think the ceiling would be really neat to do some stuff on.”

“I would love to do some more around here,” Kovalenko added.

It’s one way at least one member of the museum staff has kept herself busy during the COVID-19 closure.

“It’s been a challenge to keep the museum going, but it’s also been an opportunity to do things we’ve never done before,” Kovalenko said. “We miss being with the public, but we’re hoping to surprise them with some fun when they comes back.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.