Colorful words and images decorates the wall’s of Dykstra.
First-year English student Justin Correa has his face painted by a floormate while they apply mural art to their Dykstra lounge.
A student’s hand is painted with UCLA colors in the lounge of Dykstra Hall’s 10th floor. The mural painting gave the floormates a chance to bond before they are moved to different floors in the new De Neve residential halls.
Duane Luu climbed on top of a worn-out dorm couch and dragged his paintbrush across a ceiling beam.
Around him, more than a dozen residents of Dykstra Hall’s 10th floor added drawings and signatures to the tattered white walls of their floor lounge.
“Have you put your handprints on the wall yet?” asked Luu, a resident assistant and a third-year economics student, of every resident who wandered into the room.
A mess of open paint bottles and brushes cluttered the center table as students painted their hands and mixed paints in preparation for marking their space on the wall.
On Wednesday night, the residents of the 10th floor became the first on the Hill to paint their lounge walls.
The residence hall will close in mid-February for reconstruction, and the current residents will be relocated to the newly built residence halls, Holly Ridge and Gardenia Way.
Students were given permission by UCLA Housing and Hospitality Services at the end of fall quarter to paint the floor lounges that will be redone in the renovation.
A staff member in the Office of Residential Life first proposed it last spring, when it was announced Dykstra Hall would close the following school year. Luu proposed the idea again at the beginning of fall quarter, and it took several months to gain approval from Housing and Hospitality Services, he said.
The option to paint the lounge is available to every floor in Dykstra, but the 10th floor is the only one that has since pursued the idea.
The painted declarations of “D-10 Love Forever!” were bittersweet, as the east and west wings will be separated on different floors after the move.
“We have become a family and I’m sad that we have to break up,” said Gagan Sihota, a first-year biology student, as she painted a bunch of rose buds into one corner. “The buds represent the love we all have for each other.”
Dykstra’s tightly packed layout makes it a good environment for forming a community, said Tia Brandt, a second-year undeclared student and RA for the 10th floor. The painting allowed the floor to come together and leave its mark before the move, she said.
“We chose to do handprints because everyone’s handprint looks the same but is diverse at the same time,” said Brandt, as she painted “welcome” into the center ceiling beam.
Students soon strayed from the original handprint idea, adding pictures of flowers, inspirational quotes and even an attempt at the head of Abraham Lincoln. But an Impressionist-inspired scene of colorful flowers that sprouted from a purple handprint was a standout of the night.
John Dava, a first-year mathematics student, contributed an original poem to the wall that began with the lines, “Let’s take a paintbrush and record this earth.”
Across the room, some students abandoned the brushes and splattered a mixture of paints on the wall with their hands.
Among the jumble of different handprints and words, Judy Jeung, a first-year physiological science student, incorporated an intricate tree on the wall.
“Trees represent life, and I wanted to show how much life we have on our floor,” Jeung said.
“The best part of this experience is that we get to make a home out of our dorm.”