Paul Noot here. I’m a teacher. I’m going to talk as a teacher on this one. It was my art students, actually my AP art students the year we painted this. So they were all seniors, basically. I came up with the design because we probably submitted at the 11th hour and I really wanted kids to be involved in this art alley. I quickly submitted something and we got selected.

The design may have changed somewhat from our original submission, but we looked at our Hall of Fame at Bismarck High School, for people that have made an impact. So we wondered, how do we narrow that down to two or three people? We wanted to include an artist, so we thought we should honor Gary Miller, a long time resident of the area who graduated from Bismarck High in 1953.

The other person in the middle is Harold Schaefer. So it is about Mr. Bubbles and people being excited and getting along and joyful and playful. The whole piece is centered around his company, Mr. Bubbles.

Arabelle lived a very interesting, unique story in North Dakota that a lot of people don’t know about. I had my students do research because I wanted them to experience it all. They lived in Mandan, and at one time, they were also farmers out by Driscoll, North Dakota. In fact, if you go out to the cemetery there, you can actually see where they are buried. This piece is kind of centered around her. She has wild North Dakota flowers in her hair. There’s a student in the painting standing up. He actually worked on the painting, so he has a spray can so it looks like he’s spray painting.

Each of my students chose a duck because we were going to center on bubbles coming out of the bathtub and the pipes. We utilized the utility boxes, turned into kind of a steampunk with water overflowing the bathtub with all these ducks swimming down. So each student got to choose a duck they wanted to do. One girl with a German background wanted to do a German duck. There’s also a military duck, Mexican duck, and an African duck. All these ducks represent the student that painted it.

So that’s kind of what this piece is about. Steampunk, bubbles, BHS alumni, learning, and education. There’s books on it. It was a fun piece. In fact, we joked around because so many of the pieces had bison on them, so we decided to put a dinosaur up on the top. We also did some graffiti type lettering. It says B Town and then class of 2017. That’s what this piece is mainly about.