Kamsack residents are seeing a number of the community’s fire hydrants painted in striking, non-traditional hydrant colours.
That’s due to a project that was conducted last week by the 26 Grade 9 students in Kristen Doyle’s art class at the Kamsack Comprehensive Institute.
“We’ll probably be able to paint about 20 hydrants,” Doyle said. “We plan to do another 20 with a new group of students in September.”
In discussion for some time, the project got off the ground this year after Kev Sumner, recreation director, applied for and received a cultural outreach grant of $633 from Parkland Valley Sport, Recreation and Culture, which allowed him and Doyle to purchase the paint and associated tools to undertake the project.
“We’ve decided to let the students paint the hydrants however they choose,” Doyle said, adding that among the selected designs for various hydrants would reflect a range of images including Minions, trains, aliens, Duck Mountain and John Deere.
“We bought all the colours we could of an oil-based paint that is good for metal,” she said. “And we’ve mixed some colours as well.”
The students started with the hydrants in the downtown core area which are the areas with the highest traffic.
Painting a community’s fire hydrants is not a new scheme, she said. They have been painted, for example, in Melville and Humboldt.
The idea is to take an ordinary object and draw attention to it,” she said. In addition, the Grade 9 art curriculum includes a section about taking action by using art for the greater good.
“We’re stoked about painting the hydrants,” she said.
