BELLE — Osage Arts Community (OAC) resident artist Ray Swaney, Belle High School art teacher Cody Walker and members of the BHS Art Club collaborated on a mural project on one of the walls of the future OAC ceramics center in Belle.

Swaney’s pitch for the project was to create an abstract mural that does not represent anything in reality. It consists of colors and shapes. Each student designed an abstract shape. Then, Swaney uploaded the shapes to his computer where he could design a digital collage to act as the reference for the mural.

“It’s a bit easier (working) with digital collage because you can undo things, and you can cut things a lot more precisely,” he said. “The main downside to digital is you just don’t have a physical original copy.”

Once it was time to paint, Swaney cut stencils of the shapes out of cardboard so the artists could paint the mural based on the digital collage. At least one of the artists held the stencil against the wall while another sprayed paint over the stencil.

“The kids have something they can come back to town to (see),” Swaney said. “If they’re going to college, it’ll be there for a few years.”

He added that the plan for the mural is to leave it as it is for a few years before another group uses the wall for a new mural project. Eventually, OAC plans to use the building as a ceramics center, but the organization estimates it will take about $40,000 worth of renovations to make that happen.

Humidity and some extra-strong painter’s tape had kept the paint from sticking in a few spots, so Swaney said he planned to touch up parts of the mural over the next couple of weeks.

After finishing work on the mural, the artists signed around the corner of the building with their names and Instagram usernames. The mural is located a few steps over the Osage County line from OAC at 100 S Alvarado Avenue in Belle.

“Community art is great because it brings people in the community together,” he said. “It makes the town more interesting and likely to be visited. Maybe if we get a bunch of murals around Belle, people will say ‘Oh, let’s go to Belle and check out the murals.’ And then they’ll stop and grab a bite at J and J’s, or (Padgett’s Place) or El Charro Mexican Restaurant. It’ll just bring a little bit of money in (to the community).”

Swaney’s focus at OAC is a project that blends poetry with comic book-style art. Other work he has done during his stay includes several abstract paintings. He said sometimes audiences for abstract art say they do not understand the pieces despite liking what they see.

“I think you get it if you like looking at it,” he said.

Swaney said some of the appeal of abstract art is that it does not have to look like anything in particular. The lack of constraints appeals to children, especially before they have had a chance to refine their artistic skills.

“A lot of kids’ first thing they do in art is finger painting or scribbling; just making shapes and colors on a piece of paper,” he said. “(Abstract art) is one of those things where you don’t have to be good at drawing something to do it.”

For some artists, the abstract sensibilities continue through their childhood and into their work as adults. Swaney said his interest in abstract art really began in his 20s. His work to that point had mostly been comic book-style art, but he sometimes doodled more abstract ideas. After Swaney got a book of prints by painter Wassily Kandinsky, who art historians credit as a pioneer of abstraction in Western art, he began to explore the abstract in more of his own work.

“I forced myself to look at each piece for five minutes because I was riding the bus on a 40-minute bus ride to work,” he said. “So I would sit and force myself to look at each piece studying the color. And then I got off the bus, and I felt drunk. Then, the next day, I put in my two weeks’ notice, I came in and I cashed out what retirement I had coming to me and I just did abstract art for 15 months.”

Swaney has a multisensory condition called aphantasia, which makes him unable to visualize things in his mind.

“It makes sense to me that I would like (abstract art) because you don’t have to have something in mind already because you’re making stuff that doesn’t (exist),” he said. “It does really well with aphantasia creating things outside of your head that you can’t create inside.”

Other artists live with aphantasia. Swaney mentioned animator Glen Keane, whose work with Walt Disney Animation Studios led him to design characters such as Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” and the Beast from “Beauty and the Beast.”

“It was really interesting watching him work,” Swaney said. “While he was drawing, he’d be making the faces like whatever he’d be drawing. It was just a little roundabout way of doing it since he can’t imagine it in his head.”

Although aphantasia prevents Swaney from visualizing his drawings, some of the challenges go away with practice.

“I’ve drawn people a million times, so I can do that,” he said. “If someone was like ‘drawn an elephant,’ and I haven’t drawn an elephant, I can kind of draw the shape because I know the concepts of the shapes and the parts of the elephant. Then I just have to sketch it out and say ‘No, that’s wrong.’”

Swaney described his creative process as a feedback loop where he makes something, looks at it, then adjusts it.

“It’s very peaceful like a meditation,” he said. “I don’t have to think about it. I just get in and do it.”

Swaney’s OAC residency concludes at the end of June. Anyone who wants to keep up with his work after he leaves Belle can follow him on Instagram under the name Rayasway.