Adding color to the city skatepark

MOSES LAKE — As the skaters and scooter riders wander around her, Erika Kovalenko is busy squatting on her red plastic art box and daubing lavender paint on the side of a ramp.

It’s the start of a dragon’s head.

“It’s a request from the kids,” Kovalenko, an artist and museum coordinator with the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center.

Kovalenko, who painted a giant Columbian mammoth in the museum’s education room earlier this year to make use of time that became available when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the museum to close, has taken her art to the skate park at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Dogwood Street.

For the last week or so, she’s been hard at work, painting murals on the sides of things, trying to add some beauty and color to the skate park.

“I had seen this spot, and it was asking for something new and fresh here,” she said.

On the eastern outside wall holding up the park’s half-pipe, Kovalenko has painted a “big señorita” levitating a brain in her left hand, surrounded by flowers and skate helmets and a banner reading “Don’t let anything poison your individuality.” On a few other walls, she’s painted soaring eagles, the stern visage of an owl, and the dragon beginning to take shape Thursday afternoon.

All of them are expressions of what she understands as the freedom, creativity and community of skate culture.

“It’s not super competitive,” Kovalenko said. “I find that the kids are really willing to help each other. It almost seems like it’s really collaborative.”

And Kovalenko is using red, yellow, purple and pink to show that “creative explosion” and her belief that “our minds are the most beautiful thing about us.”

Kovalenko said she started pitched her proposal to paint the skate park to the city’s Parks and Recreation Department in September. She sketched the main character out first, but has been painting the animals — the hawks, the owl, and the dragon — freehand.

In the week she’s been at work, Kovalenko said the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“I love it, it’s really nice. It’s a lot better than the graffiti everywhere,” said Ethan Clark, a Moses Lake High School junior and Running Start student. “It adds a lot of feng shui to the skate park.”

“It’s a good new addition,” added skater Trevor Robinson. “It’s attracting more people.”

Kovalenko said she’s planning another mural for the bare west outside wall of the half-pipe, but probably won’t get to that until the spring.

“It’s getting a little too chilly to work outside,” she said.

But she does agree that the skate park has a “whole new” feel to it.

“It brings it alive,” she said, pointing to the half-pipe. “The idea of this big bowl, it looks like they’re flying in here. I wanted the artwork to be reflective of the activity.”

“Public art does so much to enhance the community,” Kovalenko added. “I’m really committed to growing the arts here in the Columbia Basin. It’s ready for it, I think.”

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