Mural pictures a bright future for Fremont Falcons

When a former student who now works at Target approached Fremont Elementary School Principal Susan Fisher with an offer to help the school as part of her employer’s community outreach efforts, Fisher knew just what she wanted.

“I’ve wanted a mural for a long time,” she said Monday.

And Fisher knew just the artist for the job.

“There’s a man who’s super talented here – I’ve watched him come up with beautiful drawings as he volunteers in his children’s classrooms,” she said.

That man is Vince Cabrera, an artist and father of two Fremont students – third-grader Sydney and kindergartner Addison. And he was on board as soon as Fisher asked.

Target donated much of the paint and provided employee volunteers, including Katie Love, who made the offer of service to Fisher. Cabrera talked with the principal about what she wanted from the mural.

“I told him that our school (which includes the Fremont Open Plan alternative program) really emphasizes paying attention to the whole child and really emphasizes academic success,” Fisher said. “And our mascot is the falcon, so I asked if he could work that in, too, and he said, ‘Sure.’”

Cabrera had some ideas, even sketches he had done, that are being incorporated into the mural. “For me, kids are going to be the future; they’re going to build tomorrow, and we have to do help them do that,” he said.

Toward its top, the mural will bear the words, “Fremont Falcons, building tomorrow,” and the painting will show just that – children creating a futuristic world.

Working from Cabrera’s drawings, he and the team of volunteers began the painting during spring break last week. The volunteers put down the base coats and worked a lot on the background, and now Cabrera is doing the detailed artwork. It’s a big job, Fisher observed: Cabrera worked four or five hours Sunday just on details of some of the children in the painting.

He estimates it will be the end of the month, at the latest , before the painting is finished, but he hopes to be done earlier.

Cabrera, who on the Pixgram site for his Artlightstudios describes himself as a self-taught artist and “nerd4life,” works in a variety of media, and is also a tattoo artist. This is not his first mural.

“I’ve done a couple smaller ones at nursery schools and kindergartens,” he said Monday, “and at Merryhill (Preschool), I did the fence. Basically, anywhere my daughters have gone to school.”

And it won’t be his last. He and Fisher already are talking about a second mural the principal said she’s eager to add. The mural currently being painted faces out from the school and is visible from Tully Road. The other wall Fisher wants a mural on “will be passed by all the children as they go to the cafeteria.”

The Tully Road-facing mural was done first because the Target volunteers were immediately available and because Fisher and Cabrera want to involve Fremont students in the painting of the second one. “The next one, I plan to mark out squares and make it a color-by-numbers kind of painting” by the children, Cabrera said.

He said he has no qualms about undertaking another mural at Fremont. His children are his world, Cabrera said, and “if I can spend more time with my daughters when they’re at school, I will.”

This story was originally published April 13, 2015 at 6:48 PM with the headline "Mural pictures a bright future for Fremont Falcons."