‘Gratitude tree’ mural aims to help students feel calmer
STAMFORD — Artist Suzanne Bellehumeur was asked to paint a tree for a project at Stamford High School, but what resulted surprised even her.
As she started to paint what is known as a “gratitude tree,” and a background landscape on the wall at the end of the hallway directly in front of the school’s entrance, Bellehumeur started to hear students’ reactions.
And she said she was shocked.
“There was a day I must have gotten 200 compliments from students,” she said.
That reaction led Bellehumeur to change course and do something more elaborate.
“I went in to donate a gratitude tree and I ended up doing so much more because of the response of the students,” she said.
The end result is what Bellehumeur described as a “meditative mural,” meant as a sort of art therapy to help students manage the oftentimes stressful environment of school.
The piece depicts a landscape of trees, small rolling hills and blue herons, in hues of blue and gray.
“I just wanted it to be a very calm scene,” said Bellehumeur, who has painted residential and commercial murals for more than 25 years.
In Stamford, she painted the side of The Palace Theatre. She also produced murals at the preschool Putnam Indian Field School in Greenwich when her son attended and restored an elephant sculpture at Newfield Elementary School, when her son was enrolled there.
Teacher Jeanne Valentine-Fabiano, who was the first to reach out to Bellehumeur, teaches a class at the high school called stress management, which she first introduced during the 2019-20 school year.
At the time she proposed it, Valentine-Fabiano said she thought the class was necessary “to meet a need.”
“The earlier we can teach students how to manage their stress, the better they will be,” she said.
The class is only being offered in the spring semester this year, so it is not currently being taught in the school.
However, Valentine Fabiano’ s daughter Tessa Fabiano started a club this semester called Mindful Knights, which incorporates some of the same tools and techniques from the stress management class. Attendance so far has been robust, a sign that students are craving social connection in the COVID-19 era, Valentine-Fabiano said.
“COVID made everybody disconnected,” she said. “We’re going to be feeling this for several years. The students came back and it’s almost like they forgot how to do school.”
The idea of creating a gratitude tree — a common craft that involves either drawing or creating a threedimensional depiction of a tree and attaching pieces of paper cut out to resemble leaves with statements of gratitude written on them — came from the club.
Members will be filling the gratitude tree with messages, and Valentine-Fabiano said he hopes students across the school will join in.
“The goal is to touch the whole school,” he said.
While the tree is still part of the finished product, it now is on the wall opposite Bellehumeur’s mural, which she completed in three days, using what she described as a very simple palette of only a few colors.
Valentine-Fabiano said the response to Bellehumeur’s mural has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Having this mural now, it’s a place that anybody can go and take a minute and feel calmer,” she said.
Valentine-Fabiano described the work as ethereal and otherworldly.
“This is now a monument that is going to be there forever and many students coming through here will have the benefit of being able to have a little respite in a very crazy, very overwhelming at times, environment,” she said.