Mural Adds Character to Roberts Elementary School

Students at don’t have to open the pages of their books to meet their favorite literary characters anymore—they’re on the walls.

Moorestown artist Sarah Cannavo, whose two sons attend Roberts, recently completed a 270-square-foot mural on one wall of the school’s library. The mural was a passion project for Cannavo, not a commission.

She said she was sitting in the library last spring, while her son was in for his kindergarten screening, when she overheard Melanie Levan, then chair of the Home and School Foundation for Roberts, mention how nice it would be to have a mural in the library. All the other Moorestown elementary schools had murals, except Roberts.

“I just kind of spoke up and said, ‘Oh, I happen to do murals. I would love to do one here,’” Cannavo recalled. The rest, as they say, is history.

Speaking of history, the Roberts mural wasn’t Cannavo’s first. She figured she’s done about a half dozen or so murals, painting them on the walls of children’s bedrooms. She did her first right out of high school, painting one on the wall of one of her friend’s child’s room.

“I totally fell in love with it,” she said. “I really enjoy the large scale of it. I really like to paint big.”

Murals appeal to her, she said, because of the way they will “change the whole character of the room ... It’s like you’re walking into a totally different environment.”

Stephanie Morrison, current Home and School chair for Roberts, said Cannavo’s work on the mural was “absolutely amazing.”

“She put her heart and soul into this, and detail … You can play ‘I spy’ with it; there’s always something new to see,” Morrison said. “And she made it look easy.”

She said the Home and School Foundation had a surplus of money last year, which it used to pay for the mural. But it was mostly a break-even project for Cannavo, who used most of the money to pay for materials.

Cannavo began working on the mural in October and finished just before Thanksgiving, devoting roughly 100 hours to the project.

The painting features a cornucopia of literary characters—Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, Humpty Dumpty, Jack climbing the beanstalk, pirates, princesses and dragons—spilling out of the pages of an open book. And Cannavo intentionally left some areas open to interpretation.

“Some little kids would walk in and say, ‘Oh, it’s Sleeping Beauty,’ and other little kids would walk in and say, ‘Oh, it’s Cinderella,’” she said.

Cannavo said one of the highlights of doing the mural was her sons were able to watch their mom at work and tell their classmates with pride, “‘Look, that’s my mom up there.’ That made it worth it for me. It’s extremely fulfilling.”