Spray Paint Splatters at OSM Creative Hub

building located near Otter Creek Falls that was purchased and renovated by the College in 2008. While many students have probably visited the building to grab a cup of coffee at the ground floor business — the Storm Café — the top three floors promote a hub of student creative activity.

The OSM is used by the College to offer students a personal space to explore non-academic creative projects. Each semester, students can apply to be a tenant either at the OSM itself or in the Annex, the other building the program offers. The Annex houses messy art projects such as splatter paint or pottery, whereas the OSM provides space for projects such as novel writing, website coding and book club meetings. For many of its tenants, the OSM also offers seed grants to help support their projects.

“We want it to be a space that empowers students’ creative visions,” said Be n Clark ’16, one of the six OSM board members. The OSM is still accepting applications for next semester at osm@middlebury.edu.

There are many projects at the OSM each semester and sometimes they can continue for over a year. It has grown from an original group of six tenants in its first semester to about 40 tenants this semester, six years since its inauguration. This year’s tenants include a diverse range of projects; from sewing to music rehearsals, culinary pursuits to computer programming, the OSM is undeniably one of the most creative, innovative places on campus. The role of this new, monthly column will be to feature individual projects at the OSM.

One of the OSM’s current tenants is Henry Linehan ’16, a junior at the College who uses his space in the Annex to create spray and splatter paint stencil artwork. An Economics major and Math minor, Linehan is from a small town in Colorado and began working with stencils in the Annex about a year ago.

“I’m big into the Econ and Math scene,” Linehan said. “I felt like that was using one side of my brain and the art part was being completely left out.”

So last spring, after watching several videos on street art and wanting to participate in the movement, Linehan decided to apply for a space in the OSM. He began to experiment with stencils and spray paint by creating the stencils on his computer, printing and cutting them out three pieces of paper thick and then laying them down and spray painting over them.

Recently, Linehan experimented with spray paint and newspaper to create three-dimensional, texturized planets. As we talked, he pulled out his phone to show me a picture of the final product, a beautiful design with a stencil-made image of two people holding hands, a dark blue sky and several planets.

“My creative process is looking around at different things and trying to get my brain to think of them in an artistic way and come up with different ideas, whether that’s just to make somebody laugh, whether it’s a political statement, or whether it’s just a cool thing,” Linehan said.

Over the year, Linehan has tweaked and improved his technique. He found that in his first painting, the paint had soaked through the stencils because he hadn’t made the stencil three pieces of paper thick. He is also considering drawing his own stencils instead of designing them on his computer.

“Generally, I’d like to say it usually looks like I imagined it to look, but every time I do it, you never know what it’s going to look like,” he said. “It’s really cool to see the definition between where you put the paper and where it isn’t. It’s such a clean cut, I like that precision.” He admitted this might be due to his interest in economics and math.

Often, Linehan is able to work in his space with the entire Annex to himself, playing music on his speakers. “The Old Stone Mill gave me the opportunity to have this space, which is the biggest thing,” he said. He usually tries to go to the Annex once or twice a week for a couple hours, which has helped him also with his time management. “The more I keep myself busy, the more efficient I am, so having a spot and forcing myself to go in there makes me more efficient with my schoolwork,” Linehan said.

Although Linehan doesn’t have a favorite piece, he said, “Whatever I’m doing in the moment I get really into that, and then it’s all into the next thing.” The best part of the process for him is laying down the stencils and spray painting over them.

Linehan could see himself continuing his stencil art in the future, not for a living — he is planning on going into Economics — but definitely as a side project and especially during his college career. “College and classes [do not have] tangible results, whereas the results in OSM after you spray it down, it’s right there, that’s the final result,” Linehan said.

For many of its tenants, the space and seed grants provided by the OSM greatly help foster artistic and innovative talents that may be overshadowed by academics, athletics and other school related programs.

“I think really it’s just having a project outside of school. Everyone needs to have one,” Linehan said. “A lot of people get that project in community service or writing for the Campus — whatever it may be, and I find that for me at the Old Stone Mill.”